I'm attempting to set up a simple Time of Day server, but can't seem to find any documentation or packages related to this. Is this just a function that most linux distros will already perform, or is it known by some other name?

Do you mean NTP? Or is there a "Time of Day" application, as well?

NTP is "Network Time Protocol". Check out ntp.org.

Regards,
Alden

it is actually a ToD, or time of day server. It's a different protocol then NTP.

I think he means this in that case:
See /etc/services

daytime 13/tcp # Daytime (RFC 867)
daytime 13/udp # Daytime (RFC 867)

Please post your distro & ver in your profile.
In Fedora its a file entry in the /etc/xinetd.d dir. Defaults to off iirc.

Did you ever find a ToD server? Im having the same issue I cant find any tod server for windows or linux that are free and effective.

And for the ones not sure TOD is port 37.
daytime 13/tcp
daytime 13/udp
time 37/tcp
time 37/udp
ntp 123/tcp
ntp 123/udp

This has nothing to do with Daytime or NTP. TOD (Time of Day) is mostly used in cable networks for cable modems to be able to get time to put a timestamp on the log entries in the cable modem itself for trouble shooting.

So if anyone knows of a good little ToD server for windows or linux I would like the tip very much since lately I have been testing arris cmts and they dont run a tod in them most prob due to lack of horse power. Cisco cmts all run a tod and will only accept requests coming from cable interfaces and not from ethernet.

Thanks

I did.

Under debian (well Ubuntu), the default installation of xinetd includes a TOD service. If you go into /etc/xinetd/ there will be a config file for 'time'. Open it up in an editor and change 'disabled' to 'no' then restart xinetd.

I'm sure there is a windows based TOD server out there somewhere. The only one I found came bundled with some demo CMTS management software we tried out.

Thanks alot vortmax. Works great for me.

vortmax, i download ubuntu 9.04 and there is not the xinetd folder on /etc

found it... sorry

how do i know if the time service is running?

There is a apt-gettable package in Debian and Ubuntu distros called "rdate" that will allow you to query your TOD server.

rdate -p servername
or
rdate -u -p servername (to check the UDP response)

It *can* be used to change the time of a server, so use with care.

Now a small further question, running normal inetd and not xinetd, I'm having problems getting TOD to respond over UDP. It's only allowing TCP by default...

time stream tcp nowait root internal

I added this line for UDP, adjusted my firewall, and rebooted...

time dgram udp wait root internal

But I am still only getting a response on from the one running TCP. Netstat would seem to indicate that the server isn't even listening on the UDP port. Did I do it wrong? On my CentOS box, I have it responding on UDP and TCP, but the CentOS box is using xinetd...