Question

I am trying to build a sample application which will show a proof of concept for synchronizing the time with an RFC 868 compliant time server.

So far, using the Java Socket API, I am able to connect and query the server and do get the response from the server, but it is not in human readable format.

The response I get is: �)6 I think the response is coming in binary format (not sure though). RFC 868 says that Send the time as a 32 bit binary number.

My questions are:

1. How do I parse this response?
2. Apart from this approach of mine, I’d like to know if there is any other recommended approach which I should take to achieve this.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

1) How do I parse this response?

Check out the source code of TimeTCPClient from Apache Commons Net library:

public long getTime() throws IOException {
  DataInputStream input;
  input = new DataInputStream(_input_);
  return (input.readInt() & 0xffffffffL);
}

public Date getDate() throws IOException {
  return new Date((getTime() - SECONDS_1900_TO_1970)*1000L);
}

2) Apart from this approach of mine, I’d like to know if there is any other recommended approach which I should take to achieve this.

Use Apache Commons Net Library, check out the API of TimeTCPClient.

Apache Commons Net home page, hope this helps.