Learning Python Network Programming

Chapter 6

To create an NTP client, you need to call the ntplib's NTPCLient class.

import ntplib

from time import ctime

c = ntplib.NTPClient()

response = c.request('pool.ntp.org')

print ctime(response.tx_time)

Here, we have selected pool.ntp.org, which is a load-balanced webserver.
So, a pool of the NTP servers will be ready to respond to the client's request.
Let's find more information regarding this from the response that was returned
by an NTP server.

import ntplib

from time import ctime

HOST_NAME = 'pool.ntp.org'

if __name__ == '__main__':

params = {}

client = ntplib.NTPClient()

response = client.request(HOST_NAME)

print('Received time: %s' %ctime(response.tx_time))

print('ref_clock: ',ntplib.ref_id_to_text(response.ref_id,

response.stratum))

print('stratum: ',response.stratum)

print('last_update: ', response.ref_time)

print('offset: %f' %response.offset)

print('precision: ', response.precision)

print('root_delay: %.6f' %response.root_delay)

print('root_dispersion: %.6f' %response.root_dispersion)

The detailed response will look like the following:

$ python 6_5_ntp_client.py

Received time: Sat Feb 28 17:08:29 2015

ref_clock: 213.136.0.252

stratum: 2

last_update: 1425142998.2

offset: -4.777519

precision: -23

root_delay: 0.019608

root_dispersion: 0.036987