My experience is that when you are concerned about too much traffic and/or abuse
you should never limit the query rate and issue KOD packets at the same time.

Why?  Because KOD is a feature that was added later, and many simplistic (S)NTP
clients do not understand it.  They consider the response invalid, but instead 
of
leaving they will just re-try the request quickly to get a valid response.

Of course the same coders that do not implement KOD also do not implement error
recovery with decent timers and counters, so you end up sending a lot of KOD
packets to abusive clients, many more than when you just answer their requests.

I found this the hard way when I tried to limit the query rate, and the limit 
sometimes
triggered because of bursting that some clients use to get an initial time.  
While those
clients would fall back to normal query rates when sent a valid response, they 
went
completely haywire when sent a KOD.

The frustrating thing is that remaining silent does not work either, because 
those
broken clients will also just re-try when getting no reply, at a higher rate 
than when
you do reply.

Rob
_______________________________________________
pool mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/pool

Reply via email to