Some people insisted that every pool server must attain 100% availability or they should be removed or degraded to lower bandwidth. I understand this point, as SNTP clients will not query multiple servers, and we all hope that clients can get the time when querying. But this is NOT the case when servers for a given zone drops ≦ 4. At this point the bandwidth setting is useless and every server receives at least 25% of total traffic. Therefore server volunteers can not do anything to reduce the incoming traffic and prevent overloading, and removing any server from the roster will further burden the other also heavy loaded ones. And new volunteers can hardly survive this packet storming with ordinary equipment, like the 20+ international servers joining cn zone showed. This is total collapse of a zone, happened everyday in Asia and other less developed continents.
If you can not help, then at least please do not blamestorm the one who are willing to help.
As an Asian volunteer, I must repeat my suggestions:
- Enable IPv6 reply right now, at least in selected underserved by IPv4 zones. One more client querying IPv6 server means one less client querying IPv4 server. In Europe you have many servers to choose from; but in Asia we must utilize every servers to survive the packet storm.
==Below needs some code work thus not in first priority== - Provide total amount of registered bandwidth of a given zone in the management page, as an indication showing in what proportion one server will receive the total traffic. 384kbps out of 3840kbps (384kbps * 10) is very different to 384kbps out of 9000384kbps (1000Mbps * 9 + 384kbps).
- Also, provide some easy way to join in and out of zones, like a textbox to edit ccTLD entries. Admins’ human workhours shall be devoted to coding and infrastructure management, not in these general affairs.