on 3/15/09 6:34 PM, Richard Chycoski said:

> I have to agree - if you want to make the 'rubber meet the road', you 
> need systems people who understand more than just NTP.

Which makes the [email protected] mailing list such a good resource, 
because you've got a number of people on that list who have dozens of 
years of experience as a system administrator, and they have much 
broader experience than just NTP.  Fortunately, they also have a deep 
level of experience with NTP.

> Sometimes the people involved with the deep technical support of a given 
> widget (this applies to just about all widgets, not just NTP) do not 
> have the systems administration or generalists' view that is needed in 
> the so-called 'real world', and the people on this list value the input 
> from other system administration professionals.

Now you're painting this list as the sole source of information by and 
for system administrators.  Perhaps you forgot the fact that the entire 
membership of USENIX, SAGE, and LOPSA is a tiny fraction of the total 
number of system administrators out there?  Perhaps you forgot that even 
within the industry, according to Rob Kolstad the single biggest problem 
he ever had was trying to explain to people that we weren't Sage Software?

> Brad, please stop telling us that the only place to speak 'word one' 
> about NTP is the NTP mailing list. No matter how often you say it, it 
> just won't happen. People here are free to seek the counsel of 
> like-minded (and not-so-like-minded!) people. Issues relevant to systems 
> administration  (*including* NTP) are, and will continue to be,  
> perfectly germane here.

The problem is that there is virtually no overlap between the people in 
the NTP community who really understand the subject, and the people in 
LOPSA or SAGE.  And most people seem to have very serious 
misunderstandings with regards to how NTP works and how they should 
architect their systems, regardless of which community they are in.

At the very least, if I redirect questions about NTP over to the 
appropriate mailing lists on ntp.org, there's a good chance that those 
questions can be answered by the relatively large collection of people 
over there who have dozens of years of experience as system 
administrators (and are some of the best sysadmins I know of, anywhere 
in the world), and who also have many years of experience with doing NTP 
the right way.

> And Brad - who brought up NTP in this context anyway? Shouldn't that 
> have been done on the NTP list too? ;-)

I brought it up as a counter-example of a type of discussion that should 
not be held here, because there are very few people on this list who are 
likely to really understand how NTP works and how networks of NTP 
servers should be architected.

-- 
Brad Knowles
<[email protected]>        If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out
LinkedIn Profile:                 my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at
<http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>    http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks
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