Re: Micro-allocation needed?

[Ask Bjørn Hansen <ask () develooper com>]

On Jun 21, 2010, at 23:55, Joe Abley wrote:

Everyone: Thanks for the replies regarding the /24 announcement from a "/20 allocated block". Yes, obviously the /20 
announcement will handle the traffic, too.   I'm a regular reader on NANOG and consistently impressed by the expertise 
on display and the speed with which it's generously handed out.  :-)


> I'm interested in the idea of anycasting one of the pool.ntp.org herd-members. Every time I've suggested such a thing 
> I've been told (paraphrasing) that a good (server, client) NTP session exhibits reasonable RTT stability, this 
> constitutes, in effect, a long-lived transaction, and hence anycast is not a good answer unless you have confidence 
> that the potential for oscillations is low, or that the frequency of the oscillations is very low (i.e. in a private 
> network this might be a good answer, but across the public Internet it's a poor answer).
>
> Has the thinking changed, or did I just misunderstand?

I think the thinking on NTP [ see below ] is the same; but indeed when I wrote "possibly other UDP based services" 
experimenting with that was my idea, too.

I believe some of the CDNs are anycast based (Cachefly?) and they did some extensive tests with very long http 
transactions.  (And I guess do a big test daily in running the service...).

However -- Much of the pool.ntp.org traffic is from SNTP clients where the NTP considerations don't apply.  (In 
summary: SNTP = dumb client that just asks for the time now; NTP = clever server that keeps track of the time.  The 
protocol is the same, but the usage quite different).


  - ask