# Publishing the time

One publishes the time with djbwares using `taiclockd`.

The TAICLOCK protocol that it speaks was documented by Bernstein in 1997 and its chosen UDP port number was belatedly recognized by IANA in 2018.

The protocol does not itself deal in strata for time servers and has no complexities involving leap seconds. Organizationally, it expects the same simple hierarchical star topology that SNTP does: a server acts as the time source for several subobordinate machines, which in turn may be sources for yet further subordinate machines; synchronizing from multiple sources is abnormal and the client's problem; and there must not be loops in the client-server graph.

It is not a requirement that just because you may synchronize with a time server using SNTP (less of a mainstream thing than in 1997, now that GNSS has become a cheap-to-implement external time source possibility) that you cannot in turn publish the time to other machines using TAICLOCK.