Personal website mostly for my notes and resume
13 Sep 2018
Today I learned a very simple trick to get a mostly accurate date and time on a machine which doesn’t have any ntp packages installed. With only cat and some socket tricks in Linux, it is possible to get the time from the legacy TIME protocol still available from NIST.
cat </dev/tcp/time.nist.gov/13
Will return something like the following:
58374 18-09-13 17:35:57 50 0 0 97.7 UTC(NIST) *
It is also possible to do it using netcat:
nc time.nist.gov 13
Funny stuff, Star Wars in ascii !
cat </dev/tcp/towel.blinkenlights.nl/23
More telnet fun:
telnet telehack.com