Networking

A few weeks ago I wrote about using your Starlink dish as a Stratum 1 NTP server. The GPS receiver inside every dish has been quietly serving GPS-derived time to local networks since mid-2024, and it was one of those hidden gems that made a serious dent in home infrastructure setups. I’ve been running it happily ever since. Then SpaceX changed things. What Happened On 20 May 2026, Starlink removed GPS location data from its local gRPC API — the same interface that third-party tools, Home Assistant integrations, and the NTP trick all rely on for talking to your dish. Customers received an email notification a few weeks prior: “dish location will no longer be available via the local device gRPC API.” ...

I stumbled across something genuinely useful while setting up a local NTP server for my home network: Starlink quietly added a GPS-based NTP server to every dish, accessible locally at a fixed IP address. It’s been there since mid-2024, it’s officially documented, and almost nobody is using it. Here’s what that means, why it matters, and how I put it to work. What Is NTP and Why Should You Care Network Time Protocol (NTP) is how computers agree on what time it is. This sounds trivial until you realise how many things depend on accurate time — TLS certificate validation, log correlation, authentication tokens, scheduled tasks, database transactions. When clocks drift, things break in subtle and maddening ways. ...

There’s a point every IT professional reaches where the home network becomes an embarrassment. You spend your days designing resilient, segmented, secure infrastructure for clients or employers, then you come home to a single flat network where your smart bulbs live alongside your workstation, your NAS, and your Hi-Fi system. Everything on the same broadcast domain. No segmentation. No visibility. Just trust and hope. That was my situation. This is the story of how I fixed it. ...