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12 Project: Atomic Time

You’re going to reach out to the atomic clock at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and get the number of seconds since January 1, 1900 from their clocks. (That’s a lot of seconds.)

And you’ll print it out.

And then you’re going to print out the system time from the clock on your computer.

If your computer’s clock is accurate, the numbers should be very close in the output:

NIST time  : 3874089043
System time: 3874089043

We’re just writing a client in this case. The server already exists and is already running.

12.1 Note On Legality

The NIST runs this server for public use. Generally speaking, you don’t want to be connecting to servers where the owner doesn’t want you to. It’s a quick way to run afoul of the law.

But in this case, the general public is welcome to use it.

12.2 Note On Allowable Use

The NIST server should never be queried more than once every four seconds. They might start refusing service if you exceed this rate.

If you’re running the code frequently and want to be sure you’ve waited 4 seconds, you can buffer the run with a sleep call on the command line:

sleep 4; python3 timeclient.py

12.3 Epoch

In computer parlance, we refer to “epoch” as meaning “the beginning of time” from a computer perspective.

Lots of libraries measure time in “number of seconds since epoch”, meaning since the dawn of time.

What do we mean by the dawn of time? Well, it’s depends.

But in Unix-land, the dawn of time is very specifically January 1, 1970 at 00:00 UTC (AKA Greenwich Mean Time).

In other epochs, the dawn of time might be another date. For example, the Time Protocol that we’ll be speaking uses January 1, 1900 00:00 UTC, 70 years before Unix’s.

This means we’ll have to do some conversion. But luckily for you, we’ll just give you the code that will return the value for you and you don’t have to worry about it.

12.4 A Dire Warning about Zeros

For reasons I don’t understand, sometimes the NIST server will return 4 bytes of all zeros. And other times it will just send zero bytes and close the connection.

If this happens, you’ll probably see 0 show up as the NIST time.

Just try running your client again to see if you get good results after one or two more tries, keeping in mind the restriction of one query every 4 seconds.

They’re on a rotating IP for time.nist.gov and it seems like one or two of the servers might not be working right.

If it keeps coming up zero, something else might be wrong.

12.5 The Gameplan

The is what we’ll be doing:

  1. Connect to the server time.nist.gov on port 37 (the Time Protocol port).

  2. Receive data. (You don’t need to send anything.) You should get 4 bytes.

  3. The 4 bytes represent a 4-byte big-endian number. Decode the 4 bytes with .from_bytes() into a numeric variable.

  4. Print out the value from the time server, which should be the number of seconds since January 1, 1900 00:00.

  5. Print the system time as number of seconds since January 1, 1900 00:00.

The two times should loosely (or exactly) agree if your computer’s clock is accurate.

The number should be a bit over 3,870,000,000, to give you a ballpark idea. And it should increment once per second.

12.5.1 1. Connect to the Server

The Time Protocol in general works with both UDP and TCP. For this project you must use TCP sockets, just like we have been for other projects.

So make a socket and connect to time.nist.gov on port 37, the Time Protocol port.

12.5.2 2. Receive the Data

Technically you should use a loop to do this, but it’s very unlikely that such a small amount of data will be split into multiple packets.

You’ll receive 4 bytes max, no matter how many you ask for.

You can close the socket right after the data is received.

12.5.3 3. Decode the Data

The data is an integer encoded as 4 bytes, big-endian.

Use the .from_bytes() method mentioned in the earlier chapters to convert the bytestream from recv() to a value.

It should be in this format:

NIST time  : 3874089043

Here’s some Python code that get the number of seconds since January 1 1900 00:00 from your system clock.

You can paste this right into your code and call it to get the system time.

Print the system time right after the NIST time in the following format:

System time: 3874089043

Here’s the code:

import time

def system_seconds_since_1900():
    """
    The time server returns the number of seconds since 1900, but Unix
    systems return the number of seconds since 1970. This function
    computes the number of seconds since 1900 on the system.
    """

    # Number of seconds between 1900-01-01 and 1970-01-01
    seconds_delta = 2208988800

    seconds_since_unix_epoch = int(time.time())
    seconds_since_1900_epoch = seconds_since_unix_epoch + seconds_delta

    return seconds_since_1900_epoch

Assuming NIST’s number isn’t zero:

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