Hi guys, I thought I'd try a slightly different approach towards Turkey.
I know there have been efforts to get Turkish Telecom / TTNet to reduce
their traffic, but even if they start to cooperate, getting the traffic
down to reasonable levels will probably take quite some time. So I set
up a dedicated NTP server in Turkey to reduce the load of other pool NTP
servers. The server has two IP addresses, so I added both of them to the
pool to get a slightly larger quota of Turkish NTP traffic. I know
adding two IP addresses for the same server isn't usually recommended
(at least if the two addresses are on the same network), but I feel that
in the case of Turkey this isn't particularly harmful.
This has been an interesting experience, mostly due to the unusually
huge amount of traffic to that server. The average NTP packet rate for
yesterday was 5531 packets / second. Unfortunately this also means that
I'll be exceeding my 2000GB/month traffic allowance, so I will need to
restrict the traffic to about 4000 packets/second. I've already written
a script that monitors the average traffic rate and starts blocking the
probes of the NTP pool management server to quickly get out of the pool
when the traffic exceeds the set threshold. When the traffic drops back
to below 2000GB/sec levels, the block is removed and the server is added
back to the pool. I think this is a rather gentle way of restricting
traffic, as I'm never blocking NTP queries from normal pool users. The
net speed setting on the NTP Pool's Manage servers page is useless in my
case -- my server is set to 384Kbit/sec, but even with this setting the
server pushes out packets at a rate of about 500KBytes/sec. The
384Kbit/sec setting does get me out of the global pool, though. In
reality, the server has a 100Mbit/s connection to the internet.
It's unfortunate that the ISP's (Vital Teknoloji) bandwidth seems to be
slightly insufficient for all their customers. This causes some packet
loss and some inaccuracies to the reported time. The graphs at
http://leopardi.miuku.net/stats/pingkameli.html show that normally the
ping RTT is about 90ms, but in the evenings the RTT can grow to some
270ms, as measured from Finland. That sucks, but I guess there's very
little I can do about it.
I've paid for the server and its bandwidth for this year. You can
consider this a donation towards the NTP pool vendor zone we're
currently phasing in. Additional servers are of course welcome,
especially from Turkish Telecom or TTNet.
More statistics about the server can be found at http://kameli.miuku.net/
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