NTP - Daylight Savings

RouterOS General
1

I have to say … using MT for NTP server for the past few months successfully and today has been a nightmare. If MT doesn’t support daylight savings time then it’s basically a lost cause. Our time zone is -08, and all day today it’s been trying to set itself an hour behind. I guess if I was in Arizona or Hawaii it might not be a problem. Can you add daylight savings time to a future release so we can use our routers as a reliable NTP server again?

Is anyone else using MT as a NTP master and having issues like this?

Sam

2

I could be completely wrong but aren’t NTP servers supposed to serve UTC and it’s the clients responsibility to adjust for DST?

3

Yes, so MT as a client is not accounting for daylight savings. If it is in turn a NTP server then everything gets hosed because its serving the wrong time.

Sam

4

But if the client adjusted for DST and then the server served this time, your server wouldn’t be serving UTC, would it?

It probably doesn’t help, but I have all devices on my network set to UTC only, all year. I found this is the easiest way to avoid confusion.

5

You do have a point. I guess the part that sucks is that I have to set the time zone to -07 for half the year and -08 for the other if I want to have correct time in my logging, sniffing, etc. If Windows and every other OS can do it I just take it for granted. That’s a hard word to spell.

Sam

6

GJS ir right, daylight savings basically means that you have to shift the timezone for one hour. for example if we now have +2 then we would have to switch to +3 in summer. now, as NTP (in RouterOS too) gives you time in UTC, you have to set these timezones yourself.

7

I agree that the server should serve the time in UTC but It would be nice if we could get the clock on the Mikrotik to be able to change for daylight savings. That way we don’t have to go out to 40 different Mikrotiks and change the timezone from -7 to -6 and -6 to -7 every spring and fall.

8

It works for me !!! :smiley:

(Arizona does not change) :laughing:

Have a good one !!

Craig

9

We have looked at adding daylight savings time support. The problem is that it is difficult to maintain for the whole world. Some places are changing dates and such…

If there is a good open source project that keeps a table of all the world changes, then maybe we could add support for it. But, we don’t want to make such a table and maintain it.

John

10

I spent a few minutes browsing google and came up with this:

http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm

I am not sure if its the right thing to use, but its a start. I believe there are standards out there for this, we just need to find an authoritative source. The above URL looks promising.

Anyhow, simply asking the MT router owner which time zone they are in (PST vs PDT) would help because then you can bounce it off the tz data and determine when their time switches, etc

“This database (often called tz or zoneinfo) is used by several implementations, including the GNU C Library used in GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Cygwin, DJGPP, HP-UX, IRIX, Mac OS X, OpenVMS, Solaris, Tru64, and UnixWare.”

Sam