On Sat, 08 Apr 2006 11:17:20 CDT, Nicholas Suan said:
It would be nice if it were that simple. However there are an annoyingly large amount of poorly-written clients whose polling ratios do not decrease after they get no response from the server. There have even been some clients whose polling rate *increases* after they get no response.
One particular piece of crapware of the tucows archive variety would retry once per second if it hadn't heard a response - but a ICMP Port Unreachable would trigger an *immediate* query, so it would basically re-query at whatever the RTT for the path was. Said software was why instead of leaving NTP disabled on the before-mentioned box, and hoping that at least *some* people would clue in from the ICMP reply, I had to basically firewall and drop the packets entirely.