Re: [Ntp] NTS Pools

[Luke Valenta <[e-mail]>]

Sorry for chiming in late, but just wanted to voice another opinion here.

> My primary goal currently is to work towards a pool or pool-like solution
that
> 1) Is drop in for end-users. I.e. if you have a working NTS client,
> the pool can be used without any changes to software.

I'm not sure I agree with this requirement. We currently still see a fairly
low number of NTS requests to our public time service (at least in
comparison to NTP requests), so it seems like now is as good a time as any
to make changes to clients, even if those changes take some time to see
widespread deployment.

> The rationale behind the first subpoint is that this is in my view
> critical for adoption. Without it, I think it is hard to get to a
> critical level of adoption. Furthermore, requiring specific support in
> the client likely means there will always be some clients not
> supporting that pool.
> ...
> Given these goals, I myself find the NTS-KE load balancer approach the
> most attractive. Requirement 1 limits the options to either Shared
> domain name, NTS-KE generating cookies or NTS-KE load balancer.

If we remove requirement 1, I personally find the DNS SRV Records proposal
from Watson [1] to be the most attractive option. The NTS pool operator's
job remains largely the same as in the status quo--to provide a discovery
mechanism for NTP providers. The interaction between pool operators and NTP
providers remains minimal (especially if we drop the "pool associated
domain names" part).

In [2], Miroslav raised some concerns about some client support for SRV
records and DNSSEC. I don't have a great sense of how much of a blocker
this would be overall, but surely it would allow for an easier transition
to NTS pools for _some_ platforms.

My main concern with the NTS-KE load balancer approach is that it
significantly increases operational strain and uptime requirements for the
NTS pool operator, which might make it infeasible for a volunteer-led
organization to run.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ladd-nts-for-ntp-pool/
[2] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ntp/ia7SHGF2vCD-x0dRDyuXa_N2Yx0/

-- 
Luke Valenta
Systems Engineer - Research