new ntpleapfetch

[Paul Theodoropoulos]

On 9/28/2018 20:56 PM, Hal Murray wrote:
> Agreed, mostly.  There is a big difference between the traffic from a few
> geeks occasionally downloading a file and a swarm of systems downloading from
> a cron job.
>
> Years ago, a friend introduced me to a great term.  I asked him what happens
> if his application took off?  Did he have plans for the servers.  His response
> was "That's a success disaster.  If that happens, we can get the resources we
> need."  But that context was all within one organization.  With something like
> NIST or IETF, our success disaster could be their problem.

Perhaps, but being a pretty tiny text file, I'd imagine it would take an 
awful lot to affect them - again, particularly since they already 
distribute the file via ftp, which I'm sure incurs its own fair share of 
traffic. Over https of course it involves a lot more horsepower per file 
fetch.

A crafty way to avoid the 'every x on the x' problem of cron jobs - which 
can contribute to such 'success disasters' - might be to employ the 
systemd timer functionality for leapfetch, e.g. the apt-daily.timer that 
pushes its checks around to begin it at random times. Since the 
leap-seconds file I think only needs to be checked once a month - at most 
- that could ensure that even with millions of ntpsec installations, it'd 
be relatively trivial traffic load, widely dispersed.

-- 
Paul Theodoropoulos
www.anastrophe.com