[2928] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: topological closeness....
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Dillon)
Mon May 13 22:06:38 1996
Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 19:03:44 -0700 (PDT)
From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <9605140133.AA00209@butler.ncube.com>
On Mon, 13 May 1996, Vadim Antonov wrote:
> Pinging all addresses may be worse than just talking to
> a random server.
Heuristics again. You don't really want to pick the *BEST* server, you
want to avoid the *WORST* server and if you track response times and
choose the server randomly (sort of) then you already know which ones are
the worst. Just add some sort of weighting that makes a poorly responding
server less and less likely to be chosen. Then when you get a good
response from it, slowly bring the weighting back to normal. Maybe have
some sort of TTL on the weighting as well.
> To make any meaningful measurement
> you need to send many dozens of probe packets. Incidentally,
> that is about as much as the average WWW exchange takes.
Yep. And the WWW exchange provides all the measurements you should need.
> PS I would also be sceptical about attempts to
> "try" such things as perpetuum mobile or
> palm reading just on the chance that they may
> work.
Palm reading is just a hash function that nature uses to make sure we
don't all rush to the same side of the boat :-)
Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com
