[time] FUBAR clients are eating my bandwidth

[Pete Stephenson]

On 1/24/05 9:42 AM +0100, Brad Knowles wrote:
>At 8:47 PM -0800 2005-01-23, Pete Stephenson wrote:
>
>>  The strangest thing I've noticed is the enormous number of queries
>>  from dynamic/residential connections like cable, DSL, and dialup. I
>>  know for a fact that most of these ISPs have network-local NTP
>>  servers for their routers and clients. Why they use pool.ntp.org
>>  rather than their ISPs timeserver is beyond me...
>
>	Because this is what Debian, NetBSD, and OpenBSD ship with by 
>default?  Presumably Gentoo and lots of other Linux distributions as 
>well?

Indeed. I knew about the Debian link, but was not aware of any other 
distribution using it. Thanks for the heads-up.

>	I was trying to beat into the heads of the respective people 
>with the FreeBSD project that they should avoid depending 
>exclusively on pool.ntp.org in their default configuration (i.e., 
>following the rest of the crowd), but I don't know whether I got 
>through.

Hmm. Indeed. Or perhaps including the pool.ntp.org "server", but also 
putting in the comments section a note encouraging people use use 
their ISPs timeserver if possible. I would think that most end-users 
would be more than adequately served by their ISPs timeserver.

On a side note, I'm not terribly happy with xntpd, though I'm having 
extreme difficulty upgrading it to NTP 4.2.0 (some problems with 
OpenSSL). xntpd keeps drifting in and out of sync with the servers 
(between <1 and 100ms, though it normally is approximately 20ms off 
the server it's synced to). The data links between my system and the 
upstream servers are stable, with less than 25ms of latency. I have 
no idea why it keeps drifting this much. *shakes fist*

If anyone on the list has any experience with installing Debian (or 
indeed any linux) on a Cobalt RaQ3, I would be much obliged if they 
would contact me off-list. I've read numerous documents online about 
this, but have met with failure at every turn. Perhaps having someone 
with more knowledge would be helpful...
-- 
Pete Stephenson
HeyPete.com