Re: [SAGE] Availability Metric Reporting

[Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>]

At 4:52 PM -0500 2004/04/12, Doug Hughes wrote:

>  For NTP - you offer 3 NTP servers. one fails. by NTP design, that should
>  be a non-outtage because there's builtin failover, right?

	For NTP, having two servers is the worst possible situation. 
With only one, whether or not it's wrong, it's the one canonical 
source of time.  With three, the client can always figure out which 
one is in the middle.  With two, there's no way to tell which one may 
be better.

	The ideal number of time servers is at least four, so that one 
can fail and still leave you with at least three functional servers. 
Myself, I'd prefer at least five.


	I'm going to write this up in the TWiki for ntp.org, but it's not 
there yet.  Keep an eye on 
<http://twiki.ntp.org/bin/view/Support/WebHome>.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.