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From: brian@ucsd.Edu (Brian Kantor)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: When was last?
Message-ID: <10346@ucsd.Edu>
Date: 7 Dec 89 15:13:46 GMT
References: <1989Dec7.050042.18935@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor)
Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd.
Lines: 18

In article <1989Dec7.050042.18935@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> peltz@cerl.uiuc.edu (Steve Peltz) writes:
>I just read the RFC 977, and one thing really puzzled me. When asking for
>new articles or newsgroups since a particular date, how do you find out what
>time the server thinks it is? In a perfect world, this wouldn't be a problem,
>but with the amount of traffic coming in, there's almost sure to be a few
>articles slip by because of time differences.

You don't currently, except by other means.  The NNTP herald when you
first connect has usually got the date and time in it, and you could
conceivably parse that out and calculate an offset from your local
system's concept of time, but that would be an obscene kludge.  You
could use NTP to query the server, if you both support it.  You can use
ICMP timestamps if you're using an IP network for NNTP access.

However, we recognize this problem and in an upcoming revision to the
NNTP spec we'll be providing a DATE or TIME command that returns the
server's estimate of what time it is.
	- Brian