From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.5 [en] (X11; I; OSF1 V4.0 alpha) Description of problem: Many Linux users use the RDATE utility to synchronize their systems to our time servers. The current version of the RDATE utility contacts our servers using tcp/ip to port 37. Although this is a supported method, it is very expensive in terms of network resources since the reply from our system will always be only 4 octets long. A better strategy would be to use the udp/ip version of the same service. This provides exactly the same format of response but it does not require the overhead associated with building the connection and shutting it down. This would be a significant savings of resources for a reply that is only 4 octets long. Finally, for those users who want to use the tcp/ip version for some reason, it would help if the client program actively closed the connection after the reply from our servers has been received. Many clients simply exit, leaving the connection in a "zombie" state. Our servers typically have hundreds of tcp/ip connections in this "zombie" state. These connections will eventually be closed by a time-out, but servicing them until that happens takes resources that are not available for servicing other requests. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.run rdate 2. 3. Actual Results: Program runs okay, but leaves a "zombie" process on the server. Resources to set up and close down the connection are appreciable relative to the size of the response, which is only 4 octets. Additional info:
OK, this is more of a RFE than a bug report, resp. it contains both a bug and a RFE. I've added the UDP protocol support to the newest version as well as fixed the missing close() call after the message receive as specified by RFC 868. It should appear sometime in the next weeks on Rawhide for 7.1 Read ya, Phil