[ntp:questions] NTP Setup and Pool Promotion

Brian Inglis Brian.Inglis at SystematicSw.ab.ca
Sat Oct 12 21:56:21 UTC 2013


Few people have much if any awareness of NTP, nor our interest in it, even 
admins, for which it is just a small part of system setup. It is better if more 
use it and the defaults do no harm.

IMO more setups should default to the explicit pool statement, allow selection 
only from country and continent pools as alternatives, and point users to the 
pool list, rather than to the NTP servers lists, which are not up to date, 
require clicking on links, and careful reading, which users are unlikely to do, 
to discover access restriction terms and conditions.

Perhaps an arrangement with Google to set up a public pool using the NTP pool 
infrastructure, and heavily promote it and the pool statement, as it did with 
its DNS servers, would raise both awareness and quality of NTP setups.

In that vein, NTP related sites should focus on the pool statement and pool 
links, and bury links to only public secondary servers after describing pools, 
require more links to be clicked to dig down to more restricted access servers, 
and only on the page about the most restricted secondary servers, have a link to 
similar nested pages about primary servers, but again for those web admins, ease 
of site management trumps guiding users.

AvB's use of Geo IP location for pool clients and servers and server quality 
checking probably has a better selection than anyone trying to pick good servers 
from the small public list of servers. which quickly become overloaded because 
they are so few.



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