When a time server is more talkative than expected
When a time server is more talkative than expected:
I ran across an entry on a wifi interaction project site, that discusses the NTP server, time.nist.gov. It seems to know more than the time.
Here’s something strange to explore. A guy I know recently stumbled across this. time.nist.gov is a standard NTP server, used to syncrhonize clocks on your computer to the govt’s atomic clock.
However, it also seems to have another strange service running in port 78 and 79.
Needless to say, I tried it out:
[sunim ~]$ telnet time.nist.gov 78
Trying 192.43.244.18…
Connected to time.nist.gov (192.43.244.18).
Escape character is ‘^]’.
C: C: My name is Carol: and my husband’s name is Carl:
We come from Chicago: and we sell Candy::
409-040-001-717-511-990-945
$ 0 911 3000 8 1 0 0
Connection closed by foreign host.
All is revealed here… seems to be internal diagnostic information / server status.