Connecting to NTP Server (VB6 Winsock)

[awalyl]

I'm having a hard time figuring this one out. It could be that I don't know much about UDP, though I did manage to write a simple chat program a while ago.
The only information I've been able to find is that the NTP server uses UDP Port 123. What I can't seem to find is how to actually get the information from the server (I'll worry about decoding it later).

I was able to easily use the old TIME servers, connecting on TCP port 37, and automatically getting the data back, but not having so much luck here.
I did try sending some random data ("Test" or something), hoping that would trigger some data to come back at me, but no luck.

:s
Thanks for reading and hopefully helping

[dilettante]

As you can see at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol NTP is not something you can implement as a simple client based on request/response transactions. Clients are normally implemented as a service, often a kernel service because if you need time precision at this level your code has to run with very high priority.

The actual mechanism is explained in a number of RFCs (see links at the page I linked to above). It is a complicated process because it attempts to discover and correct for network delays which are variable over time.

You might look at SNTP as a starting point if you truly want to play with this.


Edit:

No, there is no "connecting" since NTP is a UDP protocol.

See SNTPClient UserControl for a working solution.

[awalyl]

Thank you for the information. Doesn't there have to be some quick way of receiving the time information though? I found a program that will connect on demand to an NTP time server of my choice to update the system clock. Wouldn't this mean that a specific message must be sent somehow to the server to request the information back?
I know that the process to do this properly wouldn't be so simple, but I'm just looking for some sort of information back as a test. I've looked at all of these websites, but I haven't been able to find anything concrete as to actually how it is done, connectionwise.

[dbasnett]

http://vbnet.mvps.org/index.html?cod...cksynctime.htm