If it is really hurting you big time you may choose to run a very mean hack: temporarily setup a netgear.com-Zone on your dns-servers and point these records to a useful NTP server. Adding an A-record for their website would probably a good idea as well. ;)
Yes, it is an EXTREMELY UGLY HACK. But as stated above: it might be easier to cut yourself a hand off than loosing the whole arm...
Just set up netgear.com on our cache DNSes. Thankfully that is not a signed zone :-)
I see the client's request for time-g.netgear.com is now being replied with 157.161.1.4 (our NTP server), but those clients still are not happy and keep sending up to hundreds of request/s. So I fear also sending them an ntp-server dhcp option would not solve the issue.
netgear tech support has confirmed there is a problem in one of the models and released a fixed firmware. Great! How do I tell the customers?
Mit freundlichen Grüssen
Benoit Panizzon