8:clockdiff

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      clockdiff - measure clock difference between hosts
      
      clockdiff [ -o]  [ -o1]  destination

Contents

DESCRIPTION

      clockdiff  Measures  clock  difference between us and destination with 1 msec resolution using ICMP TIMESTAMP [2]
      packets or, optionally, IP TIMESTAMP option [3] option added to ICMP ECHO.  [1]

OPTIONS

      -o     Use IP TIMESTAMP with ICMP ECHO instead of ICMP TIMESTAMP messages. It is useful with  some  destinations,
             which do not support ICMP TIMESTAMP (f.e. Solaris <2.4).
 
      -o1    Slightly  different  form  of  -o,  namely it uses three-term IP TIMESTAMP with prespecified hop addresses
             instead of four term one.  What flavor works better depends on target host. Particularly, -o is better for
             Linux.

WARNINGS

      � Some nodes (Cisco) use non-standard timestamps, which is allowed by RFC, but makes timestamps mostly useless.
 
      � Some nodes generate messed timestamps (Solaris>2.4), when run xntpd. Seems, its IP stack uses a corrupted clock
        source, which is synchronized to time-of-day clock periodically and jumps  randomly  making  timestamps  mostly
        useless. Good news is that you can use NTP in this case, which is even better.
 
      � clockdiff shows difference in time modulo 24 days.

RELATED

      ping(8), arping(8), tracepath(8).

REFERENCES

      [1] ICMP ECHO, RFC0792, page 14.
 
      [2] ICMP TIMESTAMP, RFC0792, page 16.
 
      [3] IP TIMESTAMP option, RFC0791, 3.1, page 16.

SECURITY

      clockdiff requires CAP_NET_RAWIO capability to be executed. It is safe to be used as set-uid root.

AVAILABILITY

      clockdiff is part of iputils package and the latest versions are  available in  source  form  for  anonymous  ftp
      ftp://ftp.inr.ac.ru/ip-routing/iputils-current.tar.gz.

CATEGORY

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