Gradually add/remove server to/from pool in parallel to score increase/decrease

[Coelacanthus]

@PoolMUC

I am wondering: Is there an actual issue with the monitoring? I think it might have been discussed before, but don’t recall the details/outcome.

Many good NTP servers was kicked from pool because those servers were observed badly from outside China Mainland.

@PoolMUC

As has been stated previously throughout this forum, the pool is a volunteer-run project, both as far as contributing servers are (mostly) concerned, as well as far as the back-end infrastructure is concerned, including the monitors.

So all it takes is a volunteer to provide for the resources to set up a monitor within China. Ask obviously needs to do something to actually integrate it into the overall system, but I’d venture to say that other monitor operators on this forum would be willing to lend a hand in setting up the software itself so as to minimize dependence on Ask, who usually got his hands full with other stuff (obviously not sure about current situation).

@felixonmars and @allenZ said that some volunteers have been willing to provide resources to set up monitoring servers in CN for five years, but have not received any substantial response from the NTP Pool project, according to information I got from @felixonmars

Adding servers to the China zone

There are at least two group of people willing to provide a monitoring station with GPS source: A team from Beijing’s universities (TUNA & friends); A team from within Tencent. They don’t know how to proceed though. The other thread (looking for additional monitoring station) seems quiet too.

@PoolMUC

But if the local policy is what it is, not sure how the project can help to mitigate that. Just as with the “firewall between China Mainland and other parts of the world”. As is the purpose of any firewall, if the Great Firewall on purpose limits the free flow of data packets, thereby affecting NTP traffic, both pool monitoring as well as actual time service, I don’t have an idea how the pool could mitigate that.

Since we return servers by location, the quality of NTP servers should be mainly observed by local monitor servers, or at least use nearby monitors. We need a weighting mechanism to reduce the weight of results from observation servers further along the network path. Note, that all the distance I mentioned above is pointed to “network distance” not “physical distance”.