What's left to doo on NTS

[Achim Gratz]

Hal Murray via devel writes:
> There is no security in the pool anyway, so let's put that discussion
> aside for a while.

I'd take exception with that statement.  If the pool was upgraded to use
NTS one way or the other, it _would_ provide some extra security over
the status quo.  It's a different kind of security than what you get
from running your own time servers, but if I can be sure that I'm
talking to the NTP server that the pool has assigned me instead of
talking to some random IP address that the pool thinks is an NTP server
but can't be sure of, then that's a lot better than what we have today.

> I'd like to understand the warehouse case.  Can you give me some back-of 
> -napkin numbers to work with?

A standard rack can have several hundred cores and each of them can run
several VM or containers.  One typical configuration is to aggregate the
network connections from all the "boxes" in a rack into a top-rack
switch and then run it into optical multicore-fiber network that spans
whole rack aisles.

> How would you set things up if you didn't have NTS?  How many ntp servers?  
> How many clients?

We've established not so long ago that a single NTP server can serve a
lot of clients.  The number of servers is driven by the network topology
more likely, i.e. say you want one NTP server per network span or
subnet, so the server has low latency to each of its clients and doesn't
send packets through lots of unrelated networks.  Also you'd commonly
want to synchronise these servers to some lower-stratum servers higher
up the network hierarchy and maybe have those servers synchronised via
PTP.


Regards,
Achim.
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