[ntp:hackers] How many servers for a pool config line?

Hal Murray hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Thu Nov 12 07:21:11 UTC 2009


Thanks.

davehart at gmail.com said:
> tos maxclock 4 

mayer at ntp.org said:
> For example: pool pool.ntp.org maxservers 5. 

The tos maxclock code already exists.  The maxservers approach seems more 
natural.  I don't plan to implement it.


Having thought about it a bit more...

The current code gets up to maxclock addresses per pool config line.  You 
might think you could change maxclock between pool lines, but the whole 
config file is parsed before it is processed.  So that last maxclock wins for 
all of the pool lines.  (Or something like that.)

What we probably want is something like:
  tos totalpoolservers xxx
  pool a.pool.example.com
  pool a.pool.example.net
...

Where it would try to get a total of xxx pool servers using whichever names 
respond first.


If you think diversity is good, something like:
  tos totalpoolservers 6
  pool a.pool.example.com maxservers 2
  pool a.pool.example.net maxservers 2
  pool b.pool.example.com maxservers 2
  pool b.pool.example.net maxservers 2
  ...
might help avoid putting too many eggs in one basket.

All that seems like overkill.  If it's that important, you are probably 
willing to specify the servers by hand.

But maybe there will be more than one pool someday.


-- 
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.





More information about the hackers mailing list