>As Joel points out, what tends to be much more important is network >topologically close connections, and continent/country/timezone groups >are very crude approximations.
The pool has already made a huge contribution in that there is a single well known place for good time on the Internet. Anything else is gravy. If you're willing to play DNS tricks, it may not be so hard to make pool.ntp.org resolve cleverly to a host appropriate to the requesting client. Companies like Akamai have been using DNS to send you to a "nearby" server for years. The cost is that you need more serious DNS serving infrastructure, since you lose a lot of caching. I'm a little out of my depth here. Brad, you're a DNS expert aren't you? You already shot down my idea of using DNS to protect against abusive clients; how does this idea sound? Then again just telling folks to use "countrycode.pool.ntp.org" for themselves also seems sufficient. Even if the OS doesn't know what country it's in, can't you figure that out pretty easily from IP address via one of these services? http://www.google.com/search?q=ip+address+geocoding If so, then any installer can quickly configure a better DNS name than "pool.ntp.org" without user intervention. _______________________________________________ timekeepers mailing list [email protected] https://fortytwo.ch/mailman/cgi-bin/listinfo/timekeepers
