RFC 738

Time Server 🕰️✨

okay bestie, this is RFC 738 and it's a whole vibe 💖

Who wrote it: K. Harrenstien from SRI-KL 🧚. It's from the Network Working Group, RFC 738, NIC 42218, dated 31 October 1977 📅. The title block doesn't list a category, and it doesn't say it obsoletes or updates anything 🙈.

This note describes the Time Server protocol as it's currently implemented on ITS hosts, which means MIT-(AI/ML/MC/DMS) 💻. The goal is a site-independent, machine-readable date and time that's as efficient and swift as possible 🚀. Why does this matter? Not every system has a date/time clock, and everybody makes the occasional human or machine mistake 😭. Time servers let you quickly confirm or fix a system's idea of the time by doing a brief poll of several independent sites on the network. Iconic behaviour 💅.

Here's how the network time server works, no cap 👑:

S: Listen on socket 37 (45 octal).

U: Connect to socket 37 [not ICP].

S: Send the time as a 32 bit binary number.

U: Close the connection.

S: Close the connection.

Note that this is not a normal ICP sequence 🙃. Instead of sending a 32-bit socket number to reconnect to, the server returns a 32-bit time value and closes the connection 🔥. If the server can't work out the time at its site, it should either refuse the connection or close it without sending anything 💀.

The time is the number of seconds since 0000 (midnight) 1 January 1900 GMT. Time 1 is 12:00:01 am on 1 January 1900 GMT 🌸. This base will serve until the year 2036 ✨, so we're literally set for a while 🦋. For an example, the most recent leap year as of this writing began from the time 2,398,291,200, which corresponds to 0000 1 Jan 1976 GMT 🎀.

That's the whole protocol, bestie 🌈💜