Show HN: RKIK v0.6.0 – A stateless NTP inspection CLI (Rust, async, no root)

2 aguacero7 0 7/30/2025, 4:00:35 PM github.com ↗
Hi HN,

I've just released version 0.6.0 of RKIK (Rusty Klock Inspection Kit), a command-line tool for inspecting NTP servers. It's designed for passive, read-only analysis of NTP offset and delay — much like `dig` is to DNS or `ping` is to ICMP.

Why?

In environments where you can't or don't want to run `chronyd`, `ntpd`, or `ntpdate` (e.g. containers, sandboxes, CI), there's no lightweight way to check if your system is drifting from trusted NTP servers.

RKIK fills that gap: - Query one or more NTP servers - Compare offsets between multiple servers asynchronously (thanks to Tokio) - Output in JSON or readable text - Works with both IPv4 and IPv6 - No root, no sync, no config, no daemon - Written in Rust, single binary (~2MB)

Example usage:

    rkik pool.ntp.org
    rkik --compare time.google.com time.cloudflare.com
    rkik -C ntp1 ntp2 ntp3 --format json
Example output:

    Server: time.google.com
    Offset: -1.203 ms
    RTT:    2.320 ms
    RefID:  GOOG
    Stratum: 1
Why Rust?

It compiles to a small static binary, has great async support via Tokio, and excellent libraries for terminal UI and NTP packet decoding.

Repo: https://github.com/aguacero7/rkik

Crates.io: https://crates.io/crates/rkik

Docs: https://aguacero7.github.io/rkik

Happy to hear feedback — especially if you're working with time drift, embedded systems, or observability pipelines.

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