Chuck Swiger wrote on 17-9-2007 22:38:
> I don't think anyone wants to ban people running NTPd behind NAT from 
> being part of the pool.
Ok. I hate NAT just like you, but I think we can agree that we'll have 
to live with it for some years to come.
> However, it's worth noting that this isn't the preferred configuration, 
> either.  Especially for those people whose NAT implementation tries to 
> do stateful tracking of the UDP traffic with a limited number of "slots" 
> available, as those devices tend to lose pretty badly when faced with a 
> traffic peak from the normal pool rotation....
I completely agree.
This was why I started to study how many slots I had in use. After 
cranking the table up to 100,000 slots I can easily handle the peaks I'm 
seeing from the pool. I believe that confirmes more or less that the 
state table size is the bottleneck in "consumer grade" NAT devices.
Of course this large table is a quick and dirty solution. I'm 
experimenting now off-line with a stateless setup, but I haven't got it 
working yet.
This might be a solution for pool members with a single ip address, 
although it requires an extra host to act as nat router of course.
>> I see little harm in a stateless NAT setup, no tables to overflow, just
>> the latency of an extra hop. Doesn't have to be more than 0.5 ms,
>> probably even less, and it's symmetrical. That doesn't hurt the quality
>> of the provided time service.
> This depends on your implementation of NAT, and how busy the device is.  
> I'm familiar with several NAT devices which add somewhere around 10 ms 
> of latency, although newer routers and machines running at HZ=1000 or 
> greater tend to offer around 1ms of latency.
I'm seeing 0.5 ms here on my soekris+pfsense and I expect to get it down 
in a stateless setting, because that involves less processing.
I'm amazed about that 10 ms, apparently it varies more than I thought.
> It does help that the latency is symmetric, that's certainly a valid point.
>> What is the rtt to your closest ntp server? Around 14 ms in my case.
> Excluding the ones which are peers on my local subnet, I've got two 
> which are ~5 ms away, and another two which are 9 to 10 ms away 
> (http://www.pool.ntp.org/user/cswiger):
I'm loosing 7 ms in my ppp link alone...
But let's say that 10 ms is nice for a nearby server. Can you agree with 
me that adding a (symmetric) millisecond to that is less undesirable 
than dropping thousands of requests (and much more probably) during a 
pool burst?

regards, Jan
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