Daytime Protocol RFC-867 in Golang

Daytime service is a useful debugging and measurement tool. A daytime
service simply sends a current date and time as a character string
without regard to the input.
Based on RFC-867

We will be building a Daytime service using TCP in this short example. We will create a server listening for TCP connections on TCP port 13, after the connection is established we will send back the date response.

Sounds easy? Because it is! I have ignored handling errors in the code to make it simple.

package main

import (
  "net"
  "time"
)

func main() {
  addr := ":13"
  tcpAddr, _ := net.ResolveTCPAddr("tcp", addr)
  // listens on PORT 13
  listener, _ := net.ListenTCP("tcp", tcpAddr)
  for {
    // wait for client to connect
    // when client connects, the accept call returns connection
    conn, err := listener.Accept()
    if err != nil {
      continue
    }
    daytime := time.Now().String()
    // writes data to the connection
    conn.Write([]byte(daytime))
    conn.Close()
  }
}

Then run this code and test it out using telnet you will see the response.

telnet 127.0.0.1 13

Hope you’ve learned something new, thanks for reading this tiny blog!