[ntp:questions] Quality vs. Quantity

Paul G bodosom at gmail.com
Mon Mar 24 14:58:00 UTC 2014


(I inadvertently sent this only to Terje Mathisen)

On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 12:07 AM, Danny Mayer wrote:
> What do you mean by load-balancing? NTP cannot be load-balanced.

Of course it can (at some cost).

On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 3:43 AM, Terje Mathisen wrote:
> You really do NOT want load-balancing of ntp servers!!!

Ideally the server would manage this but address based load balancing (presumably as practiced by USNO) solves some problems.  DNS balancing (viz. time.nist.gov or pool.ntp.org) is pretty weak but some of that can be mitigated in the server.  Still I'd rather have three IP addresses fronting 300 servers than three IP addresses fronting three servers assuming the goal is resilient remote service.

But I might still question the assumptions of the OP (the question is unclear) since I expect the number of queries to central "public" infrastructure to decline over time as the number of clients decrease.



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