rdate

[Chuck Musciano]

> Does anyone have the protocol for Sun's rdate and the corresponding
> daemon?

I am sure other more enlightened readers will provide more detailed
information, but I discovered that rdate uses the most trivial of
"protocols".  Simply open a socket to the desired host on port 37.  The
host will send back four bytes, in network byte order, which contain the
time, in seconds, since 1 Jan 1900.  If you subtract (unsigned) 2208988800
from this, you'll get Unix time (from 1 Jan 1970).

This service on port 37 seems to be a fundmanetal service of inetd on most
any Unix machine.  I used this to implement rdate for our MIPS machines.

Chuck Musciano				ARPA  : chuck at trantor.harris-atd.com
Harris Corporation 			Usenet: ...!uunet!x102a!trantor!chuck
PO Box 37, MS 3A/1912			AT&T  : (407) 727-6131
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Oh yeah, laugh now!  But when the millions start pouring in, I'll be the one
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