Using some stuff I’ve covered in the past on my blog here’s a simple way to put up a daytime server (well to put any service onto a tcp port. I haven’t looked into its bi-directional capabilities yet, this was just sort of a proof-of-concept…

$ apt-get install ipsvd
$ wget http://blog.apokalyptik.com/files/daemonize/daemonize.c
$ cc daemonize.c -o daemonize
$ ./daemonize /var/run/daytime.pid /var/log/daytime.log 'tcpsvd 0 13 date'

start/stop and/or monit script are an extremely short jump from there… And kind of trivial/menial… so I leave that as an exercise to you… if you care 🙂