Re: Why aren't ISPs providing stratum 1 NTP service?

[Michael Dillon <michael () memra com>]

On 21 Jul 1996, Dean Gaudet 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.

WWW servers can issue a "redirect" to a different URL. Anybody can hack
this up with something like Apache by adding index.cgi to the index page
possibilities and then enabling .cgi as an extension to automatically run
a CGI script which could issue the redirect in the HTTP headers instead of
emitting an HTML document. The CGI script would only need to be a simple
table lookup similar to what a Cisco's SSP does. Of course their needs to
be something more intelligent (like BGP to continue the analogy) that
builds and maintains the lookup table based on some sort of heuristics.

>  Until
> something like that exists 

It exists right now. Several people are doing this kind of thing. It's
just not an off-the-shelf product. Yet.

> the topology.  Your suggested use of redirects just complicates things --
> consider how the URLs would end up looking in a search engine.

Life is never perfect. ;-)

Michael Dillon                   -               ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael () memra com

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