[ntp:questions] More Granularity in the US in the NTP Pool

Uwe Klein uwe_klein_habertwedt at t-online.de
Sun Sep 9 09:21:23 UTC 2007


evandro at mailinator.com wrote:
> I would however add that having time-zone aliases would make it easy
> for OS distributions to automatically configure the NTP servers.  For
> instance, if one selects US/Eastern as the time-zone, it could pick,
> say, est.us.pool.ntp.org or est.north-america.pool.ntp.org.  Whereas
> if an user in Hungary selects the E. Europe time-zone the OS could
> configure eest.europe.pool.ntp.org.  Right now, the best the OS could
> do would be to pick us.pool.ntp.org and europe.pool.ntp.org for these
> examples, when someone in ME could end up in sync with a server in OR
> and someone in Italy, with a server in Finland.
> 
> My point is that just because a time-zone was chosen, it doesn't mean
> that it's easy to pinpoint the state or even the country.  Therefore,
> for the sake of increasing the likelihood of closer servers, choosing
> those among the same time-zone would be an improvement.
> 
The next best thing imho would be to select by lowest hopcount and ignore
any geographic details.

In internet space earth is not flat. It has lots of folds, wormholes
and anisotropic path.
I forex, while sitting in northern germany, had more consistent and shorter
ping times to hosts in the NewYork area than to hosts of another
provider here in Germany. Packets to the German DFN net used to be routed
on occasion via the US.

Hmm, my current assumption is that this flat earth is a ball of scrap paper
in a dustbin somewhere ;-)

uwe




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