- TIME protocol
The TIME service is an Internet protocol defined in RFC 868. Its purpose is to provide a site-independent, machine readable date and time.
TIME can operate over either TCP or UDP. When operating over TCP, a host connects to a server that supports the TIME protocol on TCP port 37. The server then sends the time as a 32-bit unsigned binary number in
network byte order representing a number of seconds since 00:00 (midnight) 1 January, 1900 GMT and closes the connection. The host receives the time and closes the connection.When operating over UDP, the client sends a (typically empty) datagram to UDP port 37. The server responds with a single datagram of length 4 containing the time. There is no connection setup or teardown.
The TIME protocol has been superseded by the
Network Time Protocol (NTP).inetd/xinetd implementation of TIME
On
Linux ,FreeBSD , and otherUNIX-like operating systems a time server is often built into theinetd daemon. The time service is usually not enabled by default. It may be enabled by adding the following lines to the file /etc/inetd.conf and telling inetd to reload its configuration: time stream tcp nowait root internal time dgram udp wait root internalOn
OpenBSD ,inetd configured to support TIME service by default.Modern versions of
Linux usexinetd instead ofinetd . On modernRed Hat Linux systems there are text files /etc/xinetd.d/time (for TCP version) and /etc/xinetd.d/time-udp (for UDP version). Changing the disable parameter to disable = no will enable the service. Restart the service using the service xinetd restart command.See also
* List of well-known ports
* Echo
*DISCARD
*DAYTIME
*CHARGEN
*Network Time Protocol External links
*RFC 868
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