Why aren't ISPs providing stratum 1 NTP service?

Mon Jul 22 06:26:06 UTC 1996

On 21 Jul 1996, Dean Gaudet wrote:

> In article <hot.mailing-lists.nanog-Pine.BSI.3.93.960719091042.14736C-100000 at sidhe.memra.com>,
> Michael Dillon  <michael at memra.com> wrote:
> >And heavily used WWW servers are another thing that could benefit from
> >aligning themselves with the topology.
> 
> The protocols don't support this cleanly.  So far nothing I've seen would
> allow a single URL to be used to access the "nearest" server.  Until
> something like that exists (i.e. the end users don't need to know a thing
> about network topology) it seems pointless to align WWW servers with
> the topology.  Your suggested use of redirects just complicates things --
> consider how the URLs would end up looking in a search engine.

You first have to get a decent metric for "nearest" down first, and then be
able to measure and use it. Something basic like AS path lengths doesn't work,
so you'll probably end up having to use something like history of RTTs. Not an
easy problem to solve, to put it mildly.

-dorian