[3541] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Why aren't ISPs providing stratum 1 NTP service?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Dillon)
Sun Jul 21 19:45:56 1996
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 16:34:42 -0700 (PDT)
From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>
To: Dean Gaudet <dgaudet@hotwired.com>
cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <4sub2e$565@re.hotwired.com>
On 21 Jul 1996, Dean Gaudet wrote:
> >And heavily used WWW servers are another thing that could benefit from
> >aligning themselves with the topology.
>
> The protocols don't support this cleanly. So far nothing I've seen would
> allow a single URL to be used to access the "nearest" server.
WWW servers can issue a "redirect" to a different URL. Anybody can hack
this up with something like Apache by adding index.cgi to the index page
possibilities and then enabling .cgi as an extension to automatically run
a CGI script which could issue the redirect in the HTTP headers instead of
emitting an HTML document. The CGI script would only need to be a simple
table lookup similar to what a Cisco's SSP does. Of course their needs to
be something more intelligent (like BGP to continue the analogy) that
builds and maintains the lookup table based on some sort of heuristics.
> Until
> something like that exists
It exists right now. Several people are doing this kind of thing. It's
just not an off-the-shelf product. Yet.
> the topology. Your suggested use of redirects just complicates things --
> consider how the URLs would end up looking in a search engine.
Life is never perfect. ;-)
Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com
