Hi everyone, As a follow-up to the to some of the recent threads on small zones for big countries (IPv6 and IPv4) I’ve been considering making the changes listed below. Please discuss, though I’d encourage you to (re-)read the bikeshed email before joining the discussion: http://bikeshed.org/
For context currently (and since at least the spring of 2015) the system have (with a few minor tweaks over the years) basically divided each country list of servers into 4-5 buckets and then divided up the servers in each. If the country didn’t have enough servers for this (12-15) they’d just all be listed in all the sub-zones (“”, 0, 1, 2, …). — Don’t split the servers between the “un-numbered” zone (cc.pool.ntp.org, pool.ntp.org) and the numbered zones (0., 1., etc). This will make more servers available for default SNTP clients and make it easier to split the rest of the servers between — Let “too small” zones back-fill from the continent or global zone If a country zone doesn’t have enough servers, backfill with servers from the continent or global zone. I think the way to do this would be to select a minimum number of servers and a minimum total “netspeed” (the capacity you indicate on the server management page) and then if the un-numbered zone doesn’t have this then backfill. The numbered zones would be treated separately (as per above), so the system would reset before going through them and fill each numbered zone in order and then backfill from the continent or global zone (basically so some of the numbered zones might get only/mostly local servers before the non-local ones get mixed in). — Scale the number of servers for the country population I’m not sure if we can just hard-code 12 or 16 servers as the minimum number (3-4 for each of the four zones); maybe make the minimum number of servers a function of the population of internet users in that country, so a smaller country could get by with X servers but a large one needs Y servers before it stops getting “back-filled”. — Lower the number of A records for the numbered zones to 2 for small zones I’m much less sure about this idea than the others. For small zones, would it be better to have the numbered zones just have 2 IPs instead of 4. This could allow small countries to stick with only “in-country” servers even if there are just 8? This would break the “pool” configuration in ntpd, so maybe we also need a separate zone for users of that. They could use the “sntp” zone (the un-numbered one) — Make an explicit sntp zone sntp.pool.ntp.org (sntp.super-opensource-client.pool.ntp.org, etc) to allow users to explicitly say “I’m an SNTP client, select servers accordingly”. I don’t know if this is worth the complexity, but the trade-off roughly would be for SNTP clients be more aggressive about removing (and not letting back) servers that occasionally return bad time; for NTP clients be more cautious about adding servers until they’ve stayed in the pool for a considerable length of time. I haven’t done any analytics of the data to see if this would make sense, but intuitively it might. I’d be happy to share the data logs if you know how to do analytics like this. — Allow vendors to configure their zones to default to IPv6 support for all the versions They could also specify what kind of NTP system their client uses; it could simplify the zone configuration and make more explicit the choices the vendor makes. Ask _______________________________________________ pool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/pool
