Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!murtoa.cs.mu.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!cs.mu.oz.au!kre
From: kre@cs.mu.oz.au (Robert Elz)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: World record furthest telnet: Australia -> Sweden
Summary: Been there, done that...
Message-ID: <1663@munnari.oz.au>
Date: 30 Jun 89 14:44:22 GMT
References: <8906281206.aa05174@huey.udel.edu>
Sender: news@cs.mu.oz.au
Lines: 33

In article <8906281206.aa05174@huey.udel.edu>, Mills@UDEL.EDU writes:
> Might I interest you in coming up network time (NTP) on those antipodal
> hosts and claim the DX award for time synchronization.

We've done that already ... in fact, that one of the first things we
got going (there were some people here sick of clocks that never keep
quite the right time - keeping them in sync with each other was fine,
but only of marginal interest when that meant they all showed the wrong time).

Actual use was one host here slaved off one in Hawaii, which was slaved
off one somewhere on the mainland, and the rest of the net here slved off
the privileged one.   We have (at the minute) no way to accurately measure
any error in the absolute time, but it was certainly too small to detect
comparing (manually) the signals from the phone company and the time on
the systems here.

We hope to be able to get access to Australia's standard time clock
(caesium beam thing, which is keep in sync with Paris) sometime in the
near forseeable future, then we'll be able to tell if you're really sending
us the true time, or just something close...

Unfortunately, the leased line carriers have taken the circuit away to
try and get the error rate to something close to acceptable, so we're
back to looking at our watches again.

kre

ps: If Hans really wanted to calculate how far his bits really went going
to Sweden and back he'd want to include the distance of 3 satellite hops
that I know about between here and there (perhaps more).  With 3 of those
the total distance is something pretty enormous, and the delays agree with
it...  (I saw rtt's from ping of about 10 seconds to sics.se last weekend,
with a drop rate about 75%).