NTP Relyability Proposal for Australia, Canada and New Zealand
	Canada, Australia and New Zealand do not exactly have the most internal reliable NTP protocol networks. Although it is possible to actively leech NTP time synchronizations from the limited number of universities and governmental institutions, the current number of freely available NTP servers too low in these nations to be in the national interest. Leeching NTP time from the Asia-Pacific region has its limits in the Southern Hemisphere. Canada's ability to leech from US based NTP servers is helpful, but in the remoter parts of Canada this does not work well. Clearly, the local NTP networks must be improved -- but with as little cost as possible as there is a global economic downturn and these nation's resources clearly are inherently limited.
	The Post Office Solution The Post Office in Australasia was a source of time signals, but Post Office service this never existed in Canada due to private telecom entities providing these signals in the early part of the 20th century. In the 1930s government started taking over the role of providing time signals in Canada, but the same thing happened in Australia too.
	How many servers does each nation need, and where should they be? Servers (and maximal permitted NTP data rate) Australia : 40 x 32 kbs Canada : 30 x 32 kbs New Zealand : 30 x 32 kbs Ideally each nation should scale the number of servers up to 100, but not exceed 100. There are myriad server management problems with having more than 100 servers. Ideally if it is decided to implement 50+ NTP servers, the individual server data rate should drop to 24 kbs. What should the servers be like? To reduce cost as much as possible they should be recycled Post Office computers, or Point of Sale (POS) terminals wherever applicable. The NTP servers should have no Hard Disk Drive (HDD), but instead boot from a Flash Drive (FD). The FD boot and server drives should be managed and distributed by the Post Office internally. The servers should either implement MINIX 3 or Linux, but with a minimal configuration (under 16 mb). Are there any recommended practices that should be considered to increase the reliability of the the implementation? The NTP logfiles should be compressed and uploaded 3 days, so as to help spot bad configurations. The Post Office "DNS Zones File" (part of its domain record) should be modified to account for this, but at the same time each server should also be mapped to the {*}.pool.ntp.org domain. {*} implicitly implies [ntp##].post.[au|ca|nz]. The symbol '##' implies 'forced zero' for formatting and sorting. What are the staffing requirements for this service? Australia Canada NZ What modifications would be needed at the Post Office website?
	Refrence NTP NTP.org NTP Protocol Post Offices Austrlaia Post NZ Post  Canada Post Technolgies needed Linux MINIX 3 Flash Drives Diskless Computers
	Created by Max Power Initial document 18 MAY 2010 Revised 23 JUNE 2010