On Monday 09 January 2006 21.34, Charles Swiger wrote: > New connections to the NTP pools might not be load-balanced properly > if the outage persists for a long time, but it would probably need to > be down for a period of several days before it would make much > difference.
No, the load spikes during the time when a timeserver is in the DNS rotation is quite remarkable. No zone file update for only a few hours already means that some pool servers on weak lines might actually have problems. > What problem are we trying to solve? In general: one easy to remember DNS name for time services, usable by anybody without special requirements wrt time quality. Specifically: distribute the resulting load on as many servers as we can get. The second part is where we're currently doing it by more or less abusing DNS. DNS is a mapping from names to numerical addresses, but it was never designed for the kind of load-balancing we're doing here. What we do works, kind of, but IMHO it's worth keeping in mind that tweaking DNS is a kludge I've started because I am too lazy to design a proper solution, which would be integrating support for server pools into ntpd directly. (Anybody into P2P algorithms and has a few grad students at hand who could be bullied into writing something server-less?) (And we should publish this work under a proprietary license only and patent the algorithm, so that only certified NTP clients may use the pool. Hehe.) Well, as I've said, all this is not realistic, for me, so we got to stick with DNS tweaking for the moment, and hoping that Danny Mayer improves ntpd, of course. greetings -- vbi -- Protect your privacy - encrypt your email: http://fortytwo.ch/gpg/intro
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