Gotta start somewhere ... how many of us are really out there?

[Nikolas Britton]

On 7/29/06, User Freebsd <freebsd at hub.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Jul 2006, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>
> > You might think this sounds harmless but folks have done this kind of
> > thing in the past with other products and wreaked havoc on the Internet.
> > You can start by referencing "dlink ntp fiasco" in google to get an idea
> > of what can happen to these kinds of well meaning attempts.  Let
> > sleeping dogs lie.
>
> 'k, you lost me on how this relates to the fiasco ... I did a quick search
> on Google for it, and, unless I didn't find the right reference, the
> 'fiasco' had to do with DLink setting up their software to ping PHKs NTP
> Server, without getting permissions first, and, thereby, flooding him with
> NTP requests ...
>
> > People just don't realize just how very big the Internet is.
>
> That is the problem, yes ... nobody knows how big the FreeBSD community is
> ... :)
>

I have to agree with Marc on this one. The extra load required to send
all of this data is not much:

Lets say each client sends 20 bytes and their are 10^7 clients for a
total of 190.7MB per month or 6.25MB per day . Now...
Lets say 50% (10^6.7) of those clients are set to UTC and 50% of those
clients (10^6.4) trigger the monthly periodic over a 5 day period
(10^5.7 each day) and all of them phone home within 5 minutes of each
other (10^5 per minute) for a total of 1666.67 clients per second. We
would need 32.6KB/s or 260.4Kbit/s to handle this load spike... I did
the calculations for 10 million clients, but I highly doubt FreeBSD
has 5 million so this is a non issue.


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