On Apr 9, 2007, at 2:30 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Mon, 9 Apr 2007, Chuck Swiger wrote:
If the major ISPs actually bothered to provide NTP service for their userbase, the pool would not be under such high load all of the time.At least at one point, ISPs were expected to provide more than just bare Internet connectivity-- they were supposed to provide working DNS, NTP, SMTP/POP/IMAP, and even NNTP/Usenet feeds. By providing such services locally, they reduced the amount of traffic which had to cross over the MAE/NAP peering points onto other providers, resulting in lower latency for all traffic, as legitimately foreign traffic (like web access which does needto go to the remote server) has less contention.It all makes sense !Well it doesn't really but it is conform to modern society where we wastevaluable resources.In the end, the ISPs can charge more money to their customers for externalbandwidth usage. Just like in other fields, we are wasting because somebody makes more money this way.
Normally I am a big believer in "follow the money" for trying to understand odd practices. But in this case, I really think that we have more of a case of "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence".
Most traffic by the customers of ISPs is covered under a flat rate. As long as that is the case, then there is no incentive for ISPs to try to get those customers to move more data. Indeed, it is exactly the opposite effect. It is in the interest of those ISPs to have their customers under-use their connections.
So I think that if ISPs understood how NTP was supposed to work, they would provide the service to their customers. That would save the ISP money.
I also think that there is some continental differences. I get the impression that NTP is better understood and deployed in Europe than in North America.
While ISPs really should be the solution to problem, some vendors (well Apple at least) have default NTP on the systems that they sell to use Apple's NTP servers. Other big vendors should do the same, but really it's the ISPs that should figure out that it's in their interest to do this properly.
NTP server information can be passed by DHCP (though I don't know what clients actually respect that). So end-user configuration shouldn't be a problem for the vast majority of end users.
What I struggle with is that we have a situation where the protocols are in place, the tools are in place, and the root of the system is in place. It is in everybody's narrow individual interest to do the right thing, yet so many people (many of whom really should know better) simply do the wrong thing.
-j -- Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
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