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I need to get the current datetime from a reliable source, because its likely that the local system time could be changed.

Is it possible to get this from an internet time server, one that has close to 100% uptime, preferably via a webservice method, something that is free, and I have to stress absolutely reliable?

I would hope an offering from Microsoft, or the organisation responsible for keeping global time.

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3
  • you were hoping for a service that would provide Microsoft Time?
    – akf
    Jul 28, 2009 at 11:52
  • yeah, that's something like Moscow time - only global ;)
    – Stroboskop
    Jul 28, 2009 at 12:05
  • These are the two defaults that ship with XP Pro: * time.windows.com * time.nist.gov
    – p858snake
    Jul 29, 2009 at 11:18

3 Answers 3

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18

Give a try to:

http://www.pool.ntp.org/zone/

It has a pool of NTP servers which provides accurate time data.

NTP is a protocol so you can write easily a client to query the time.

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6
  • Thanks, but I will use this as a last resort, what I am really interested in is an exposed webservice.
    – JL
    Jul 28, 2009 at 11:51
  • 10
    Synching time over a webservice seems like a tremendously bad idea. NTP is a well established protocol that was specifically developed to deliver accurate results.
    – innaM
    Jul 28, 2009 at 12:07
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    This is exactly what NTP is for. You send it a request via UDP and receive a response with time information. It's an old, reliable and robust protocol and most NTP servers have very high availability. In addition to that, you can query multiple NTP servers in case 1 is down.
    – Tommy Carlier
    Jul 28, 2009 at 12:08
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    Moreover, if NTP could suffer about network latency, imagine a webservice request with all that SOAP glory
    – HyLian
    Jul 28, 2009 at 12:25
  • So... this exact Pool.ntp.org/zone - this is the right server to use?
    – JL
    Jul 28, 2009 at 12:56
5

Pretty much every web server will tell you the time.

$ telnet www.google.com 80
Trying 74.125.224.52...
Connected to www.google.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /moose HTTP/1.0
Host: www.google.com

HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2011 08:58:28 GMT
Server: sffe
Content-Length: 11793
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
...

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2

www.pool.ntp.org is a web page that guides you through which pool of servers you should use (which is closer to you). The NTP pool contains large number of servers, so it's very unlikely that you'll stumble upon on a non-working server; very recommended. HTTP will never deliver precise time like NTP.

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