> That's the main question, are you really helping people and the > Internet globally by letting people from the other side of the planet > connect to your server to get time.
I don't know, but I think so. > Wouldn't the Internet be better off if everybody was[sic] connecting > to a server close to him. (There's this thing called a "question mark", which is conventionally used in place of "." at the end of a sentence that's phrased as a question. You might want to look into it; using it correctly increases ease of reading the resulting text, and, in some cases, disambiguates between multiple possible meanings.) Would it? Perhaps. If you can give me a way I can work towards that end for approximately the same resource investment that my NTP Pool membership is costing me, I'll be interested. Until then, I'll continue my pool membership, on the basis that the world with me in the pool is (slightly) better than the world without it. > Ideally, we should have a network divided into independent pyramids > (stratum 1s on top). I strongly disagree. There should be cross-links at every level, to reduce the damage from falsetickers, low-stratum falsetickers. (They shouldn't exist, but they do. Stuff breaks.) Ideally the cross-links should be between toplogically close machines.... > Right now, there is all kinds of cross-links between the pyramids and > that's why I say ntp is a mess and I have come to ask myself if the > pool was really helping things out. The redundancy the cross-links introduce is essential to detecting and ignoring falsetickers. Otherwise, there'd never be any need to get time from more than one place, and NTP *would* be pyramid-structured. Would I get worse time if I synced to a machine on the other side of the globe rather than a local machine? Of course...other things being equal. Other things are not always equal, though, and I'd much rather get high-jitter time from a machine in India than time off by half an hour from a machine at my own ISP. Checking against distant machines provides a sanity check on the local machines, and NTP's clock selection algorithms will normally prefer the machines that are giving me the best time - which usually means the closest ones - anyway, using the others for sanity-checking, and fallback when the sanity-checking rejects the close machine(s). This seems to me to give the best of both worlds. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B _______________________________________________ timekeepers mailing list [email protected] https://fortytwo.ch/mailman/cgi-bin/listinfo/timekeepers
