Re: Soliciting "I need these everywhere I go" package lists from Debian admins

[Kalle Valo <Kalle.Valo@iki.fi>]

Johann Koenig <johann@mental-graffiti.com> writes:

> > ntp
> > ntpdate
> 
> It would be nice to have some default servers. Perhaps one of the Debian
> machines is an ntp server, and could be the default?

That's a bad idea, I'm afraid. Netgear had a static NTP server in one
of it's routers and this was the outcome:

"In May 2003, the University of Wisconsin - Madison found that it was
the recipient of a continuous large scale flood of inbound Internet
traffic destined for one of the campus' public Network Time Protocol
(NTP) servers. The flood traffic rate was hundreds-of-thousands of
packets-per-second, and hundreds of megabits-per-second."

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/

It's just best to use the closest NTP server to avoid unnecessary
traffic. For example, I think all ISPs in Finland have one.

There is an anycast address assigned for NTP but I don't know if it's
supported at all. At least I haven't heard anything about it. That's
too bad, because it would avoid the hassle.

-- 
Kalle Valo