One of my products uses an old OCX control that can query NIST and old RFC 868 TIME servers to get the current time. To make things easier for the users of the product I have a server that provided the RFC 868 TIME service for them to use. The main reason I did this is that service for such an old protocol is a little patchy and I wanted them to have a server they could rely on. Main problem is that the old protocol isn’t included in Ubuntu any more (the newer NTP protocol is supported though with NTPDATE or NTPD). So I’ve had to work out how to enable the RFC 868 Protocol on one of my new servers. Turns out it was pretty simple. First download and install the XINETD super-server.

sudo apt-get install nfs-common nfs-kernel-server xinetd

Then edit /etc/xinetd.d/time to enable the time server. I changed mine to the following because I only wanted to use the TCP version.

service time
{
        disable         = no
        type            = INTERNAL
        id              = time-stream
        socket_type     = stream
        protocol        = tcp
        user            = root
        wait            = no
}

# This is the udp version.
service time
{
        disable         = yes
        type            = INTERNAL
        id              = time-dgram
        socket_type     = dgram
        protocol        = udp
        user            = root
        wait            = yes
}

Final step was to restart the XINETD super server with:

sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart

Note to self. Ditch the OCX control and build something in .NET that uses the newer protocol on port 127.