Setting system time thru http headers

First I hope I don't offend the authors of this, by posting their code, but I just saw this on Freshmeat.net, and found it very useful, and wondered "Why didn't I think of that?"

I don't know about you, but synchronizing system time on my linux box can sometimes be a hassle.... certain ports in the firewall must be open, often the time server dosn't respond, or there are proxy problems. This solves that problem by extracting the date/time from active http servers. On the HTP homepage are c and Perl versions, there is even a lightweight Perl version that just uses sockets.

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth Remember How Lucky You Are

Comment on Setting system time thru http headers

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Re: Setting system time thru http headers by smiffy (Pilgrim) on Sep 03, 2008 at 05:29 UTC
It depends on how accurate you want your system clock to be. Issues: On what time stratum is the server in question running? To what resolution is the timestamp on HTTP headers set by the server software? If I were on a system where the ntp ports were blocked by the firewall (a rather strange thing to do), I would acquire a cheap GPS module via eBay and set up my own Stratum 1 time server. As a matter of fact, I am doing this anyway, despite the fact that I'm running at Stratum 3 quite happily here.	[reply]
Re^2: Setting system time thru http headers by zentara (Cardinal) on Sep 03, 2008 at 13:06 UTC
Setting up your own time server seems more complex than anything else, although its very cool. I only need 1 or 2 seconds of accuracy. With these scripts all I need to do is add my username to the sudo list for date, and I can update my time as a user. I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth Remember How Lucky You Are	[reply]