In order to synchronize your machine time with one of the Internet time servers, you can write a Python client for that. For this, ntplib will be used. Here, the client/server conversation will be done using Network Time Protocol (NTP). If ntplib is not installed on your machine, you can get it from PyPI with the following command using pip or easy_install:

$ pip install ntplib

We create an instance of NTPClient and then we call the request() method on it by passing the NTP server address.

Listing 1.11shows how to print the current time from the Internet time server is as follows:

 #!/usr/bin/env python
# Python Network Programming Cookbook -- Chapter - 1
# This program is optimized for Python 2.7. It may run on any
# other Python version with/without modifications

import ntplib
from time import ctime

def print_time():
    ntp_client = ntplib.NTPClient()
    response = ntp_client.request('pool.ntp.org')
    print ctime(response.tx_time)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print_time()

In my machine, this recipe shows the following output:

$ python 1_11_print_machine_time.py 
Thu Mar 5 14:02:58 2012

Here, an NTP client has been created and an NTP request has been sent to one of the Internet NTP servers, pool.ntp.org. The ctime() function is used for printing the response.