ntp.ubuntulinux.org? (was: Race condition during startup?)

[Paul Sladen]

On Sat, 1 Oct 2005, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> That may or may not be a good thing depending on your personal level of
> paranoia/privacy  (personally I couldn't care less that the ubuntu
> people know that I'm running ubuntu on 2 of my computers)

If both of your computers are sitting behind the same NAT gateway, then it
is likely not possible to know that you have two machines;  just that you
have a habit of power-cycling twice as often as other people.

One big-brother improvement would be to automatically file the Hardware
profile to  http://hwdb.ubuntu.com  and then use the resulting MD5 hash as a
unique identifier that the ntp-client can transmit on boot.  Then you could
create proper maps of how often people power-cycle and with what hardware.

Now, if ntp were to call-home twice, once at the start of boot sequence and
once at the end (with the above MD5 appended), Scott would instantly get all
boot-chart data about which spec machines boot at which speeds.

Combine that with 'popularity-contest' and Ubuntu gets good data on which
extra packages people are using and how they slow down boot-speed.

Probably needs a good EULA (GPL compatible if possible) to enforce that
people actually use this and don't run 'apt-get remove ntp-client' or dare
to edit the available NTP servers.  Could be dangerous for people's health.

	-Paul
-- 
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