Has there been any thought about using a geographic DNS server in addition to the round robin algorithm used to hand out time server IP addresses?
The idea behind geographic DNS server is to provide an IP address based the IP address of the computer making the DNS query. This technique is being used by a number of internet sites included Olympics.com. The Olympic site is being served by Akamaai (http://www.akamai.com/) but several other companies depend upon the technology as well. (http://www.netli.com for example). It is easy enough to play with the Olympics site to see how it works by making DNS queries from different parts of the world. The same technique could be used for NTP. There are several choices for the DNS server to use. It might even be worth exploring teaming up with one the industry players in exchange of a bit of publicity. Some CISCO routers have a built in DNS servers that offer this ability. It should be possible to do this with tinydns or bind. It does require a bit of work and magic of coordination of IP's to geographic location (or network segments actually) but the big boys already do it and I'm sure there are folks already associated with the NTP pool project up for the task. The end result would be that every user just puts in the same three addresses and let the DNS server figure out the closest servers to use. What caused me to think about this for NTP was the hubbub reported last week of home routers having fixed NTP address built into them. This would simplify the general NTP pool address but probably more importantly offer protection for Class 1 servers that only want to server traffic to a specific geographic area. Mike Hugo Mike ------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ timekeepers mailing list [email protected] https://fortytwo.ch/mailman/cgi-bin/listinfo/timekeepers
