[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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