NTP behind a HTTP proxy?

As NTP uses UDP port 123, of course setting the date via NTP (ntpdate) behind a proxy isn't possible without doing some tunneling/encapsulation wizardry. There is, however, a very nice solution using the time api. As it works over a Web server, the proxy problem is immediately resolved.

For example, to set your date/time according to your timezone:

# export http_proxy=http://proxy.mycompany.com:8080/
# date -s "$(wget -q -O - http://www.timeapi.org/gmt)"

Easy, right!