Daytime Protocol

The Daytime Protocol is a service in the Internet Protocol Suite defined in 1983 in RFC 867 by Jon Postel. It is intended for testing and measurement purposes in computer networks.

A host may connect to a server that supports the Daytime Protocol on either Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or User Datagram Protocol (UDP) port 13. The server returns an ASCII character string of the current date and time in an unspecified format.

On UNIX-like operating systems, a daytime server is usually built into the inetd (or xinetd) daemon. The service is usually not enabled by default. It may be enabled by adding the following lines to the file /etc/inetd.conf and telling inetd to reload its configuration:

daytime stream tcp nowait root internal
daytime dgram udp wait root internal

An example output may be:

Thursday, February 2, 2006, 13:45:51-PST

• List of well-known ports
• Echo Protocol
• QOTD
• Time Protocol
• Network Time Protocol

• RFC 867
• List of NIST time servers supporting this protocol

• Network time-related software
• Application layer protocols
• Computer network stubs

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• All stub articles