At 8:01 AM +0200 2005-09-12, Henk P. Penning wrote:
Great ; can we assume (for all practical purposes) that
the relation is symmetrical ? That is
.xx => .yy implies .yy => .xx
I'm not convinced that this is the case. Moreover, we're more
concerned about being topologically close to a decent number of
servers, not just being regionally close. Moreover, you have a
number of cases where countries like Spain are close to both Portugal
and France, but France and Portugal are not close to each other.
Belgium is regionally close to Luxembourg, but that doesn't do
anything for us, since all Internet connectivity to Luxembourg is
actually pretty bad. The UK, Netherlands, and Germany are the top
three Internet-connected countries in Europe (almost all
transatlantic cables terminate in either the UK or NL), with Austria
probably fourth and France a very far distant fifth -- maybe even
sixth behind Poland.
Note that the Netherlands pulls well beyond their expected
weight, because they have a population of only about 16 million, and
yet they are #2 in the region, ahead of even Germany with a
population that is almost twenty times the size.
On a topological basis, if you check network latency and
bandwidth available, most connections in Europe would ultimately
promote through one of the top three. Luxembourg would probably be
better off promoting through the Netherlands and Germany and skip
Belgium altogether, and the same for France.
Let's look at the current list of European servers, according to
<http://www.pool.ntp.org/zone/europe>:
Austria - at.pool.ntp.org (6)
Belgium - be.pool.ntp.org (3)
Bulgaria - bg.pool.ntp.org (0)
Czech Republic - cz.pool.ntp.org (1)
Denmark - dk.pool.ntp.org (7)
Finland - fi.pool.ntp.org (4)
France - fr.pool.ntp.org (13)
Germany - de.pool.ntp.org (44)
Greece - gr.pool.ntp.org (1)
Hungary - hu.pool.ntp.org (3)
Ireland - ie.pool.ntp.org (2)
Italy - it.pool.ntp.org (6)
Luxembourg - lu.pool.ntp.org (1)
Netherlands - nl.pool.ntp.org (40)
Norway - no.pool.ntp.org (4)
Poland - pl.pool.ntp.org (6)
Portugal - pt.pool.ntp.org (0)
Romania - ro.pool.ntp.org (4)
Russian Federation - ru.pool.ntp.org (6)
Slovenia - si.pool.ntp.org (3)
Spain - es.pool.ntp.org (8)
Sweden - se.pool.ntp.org (8)
Switzerland - ch.pool.ntp.org (12)
United Kingdom - uk.pool.ntp.org (34)
Now, let's sort that list by number of servers:
Germany - de.pool.ntp.org (44)
Netherlands - nl.pool.ntp.org (40)
United Kingdom - uk.pool.ntp.org (34)
France - fr.pool.ntp.org (13)
Switzerland - ch.pool.ntp.org (12)
Spain - es.pool.ntp.org (8)
Sweden - se.pool.ntp.org (8)
Denmark - dk.pool.ntp.org (7)
Poland - pl.pool.ntp.org (6)
Russian Federation - ru.pool.ntp.org (6)
Italy - it.pool.ntp.org (6)
Austria - at.pool.ntp.org (6)
Norway - no.pool.ntp.org (4)
Romania - ro.pool.ntp.org (4)
Finland - fi.pool.ntp.org (4)
Hungary - hu.pool.ntp.org (3)
Slovenia - si.pool.ntp.org (3)
Belgium - be.pool.ntp.org (3)
Ireland - ie.pool.ntp.org (2)
Czech Republic - cz.pool.ntp.org (1)
Greece - gr.pool.ntp.org (1)
Luxembourg - lu.pool.ntp.org (1)
Portugal - pt.pool.ntp.org (0)
Bulgaria - bg.pool.ntp.org (0)
Looking at this list, it seems to me that any zone that doesn't
have at least five servers in it should probably be demoted to zero,
and then that domain should become an alias for the closest larger
domains.
Moreover, there's an element of bias here -- how many of these
countries have vibrant FLOSS communities, and where the majority of
the people speak English, and therefore would be more likely to have
heard of this project?
As an interesting exercise, let's look at the populations of
these countries (as sorted by number of servers), according to the
CIA World Factbook (also a good source of information on border
countries, btw):
Germany 82431390
Netherlands 16407491
United Kingdom 60441457
France 60656178
Switzerland 7489370
Spain 40341462
Sweden 9001774
Denmark 5432335
Poland 38635144
Russia 143420309
Italy 58103033
Austria 8184691
Norway 4593041
Romania 22329977
Finland 5223442
Hungary 10006835
Slovenia 2011070
Belgium 10364388
Ireland 4015676
Czech Republic 10241138
Greece 10668354
Luxembourg 468571
Portugal 10566212
Bulgaria 7450349
The amazing thing to me is that the Netherlands is #2 on the list
for number of servers (40), and yet way down the list on population,
and that Switzerland with half the tiny population of the Netherlands
could still manage to score fifth (with twelve)!
Anyway, all that aside, the more I look at this, the more I think
too much geographic specificity is a bad thing, and we should
eliminate all country-specific domains and instead stick with
regional domains as well as their numbered sub-domains (preferably
four).
--
Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
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