Hi everyone
There is a problem here in Iran. Iran's parliament approved in June 2022 that dst will no longer be implemented in the country and the time will not change from March 22, 2023.
But today, the clock of all devices, including PCs, laptops and mobile phones of millions of Iranians, was changed and moved forward by one hour. And this situation has now created a big problem for millions of Iranians and they can no longer set the clock of their devices from ntp servers.

Y J <jamalpouryousef@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone
> There is a problem here in Iran. Iran's parliament approved in June 2022 that dst will no longer be implemented in the country and the time will not change from March 22, 2023.
> But today, the clock of all devices, including PCs, laptops and mobile phones of millions of Iranians, was changed and moved forward by one hour. And this situation has now created a big problem for millions of Iranians and they can no longer set the clock of their devices from ntp servers.

DST is NOT controlled by ntp, but rather your operating system's time
zone file.

As a work around you can set your time zone in the OS to be off by an
hour until the OS vendor gets around to fixing the issue. The time zone
will be off, but the clock time will be correct.

On 22/03/2023 16:59, Jim Pennino wrote:
> DST is NOT controlled by ntp, but rather your operating system's time
> zone file.

Furthermore, Debian Linux has the correct rules:

TZ=Asia/Tehran date; TZ=UTC date
Wed 22 Mar 20:48:32 +0330 2023
Wed 22 Mar 17:18:32 UTC 2023

and so has the IANA master copy of the database
<https://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/tzdata-latest.tar.gz> (file:
asia):

Rule Iran 2017 2019 - Mar 21 24:00 1:00 -
Rule Iran 2017 2019 - Sep 21 24:00 0 -
Rule Iran 2020 only - Mar 20 24:00 1:00 -
Rule Iran 2020 only - Sep 20 24:00 0 -
Rule Iran 2021 2022 - Mar 21 24:00 1:00 -
Rule Iran 2021 2022 - Sep 21 24:00 0 -

# Zone NAME STDOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL]
Zone Asia/Tehran 3:25:44 - LMT 1916
3:25:44 - TMT 1935 Jun 13 # Tehran Mean Time
3:30 Iran +0330/+0430 1977 Oct 20 24:00
4:00 Iran +04/+05 1979
3:30 Iran +0330/+0430

This says the current standard offset from UTC was three and a half
hours, since 1979, the last change was to no additional offset from
that, and was at midnight on September 21 2021, and no future changes
are known.

I wonder if this could be the result of an embargo, implemented by
either Iran on the USA? At least for open source software, the latter
should not be an issue, as it can be obtained from other countries.

On 22/03/2023 17:37, David Woolley wrote:
> and so has the IANA master copy of the database

This change was committed on the Github version of the database on May
10, 2022
<https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/66b18d9835dda089d65349c86e7851c4f0746e09>

It looks like the change was published in version 2022g of the database,
on 2022-11-29.

This is the citation for the change:

# From Ali Mirjamali (2022-05-10):
# Official IR News Agency announcement: irna.ir/xjJ3TT
# ...
# Highlights: DST will be cancelled for the next Iranian year 1402
# (i.e 2023-March-21) and forthcoming years.

(It is conceivable that the change date being so near the the Iranian
year end confused some companies not using the TZ database, but all open
source software, should be using this database which seems correct.)

On 22/03/2023 15:53, Y J wrote:
> and mobile phones

My Samsung Android has the correct time zone information (as checked in
the world clock tab of the clock app). It is possible that the local
mobile networks have the wrong information and that telling Android
phones to use their actual location, rather than the network supplied
information, might help.

On 2023-03-22, Y J <jamalpouryousef@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone
> There is a problem here in Iran. Iran's parliament approved in June 2022 that dst will no longer be implemented in the country and the time will not change from March 22, 2023.
> But today, the clock of all devices, including PCs, laptops and mobile phones of millions of Iranians, was changed and moved forward by one hour. And this situation has now created a big problem for millions of Iranians and they can no longer set the clock of their devices from ntp servers.

NTP has nothing to do with Daylight saving time, or even time zones. NTP
deals strictly and only with UTC. It is the computer itself that deals
with translating that time to local time. We have no idea what computer
systems "everyone" is using. On Linux there is a file called the
timezone file, which needs to be kept up to date to allow the computer
to figure out how to translate UTC to local time. I suspect that most
people have never kept that file up to date.
On linux/unix the computer itself works on UTC and translations are done
as needed. On many windows system, exp older one, the computer sets its
own time to local time, and has the system translate utc to local time
(inclding DST).

Mobile phones are almost always set by the phone provider, so it is a
problem with the company that supplies your phone service. Complain to
them.

Am 22.03.2023 um 08:53:21 Uhr schrieb Y J:

> There is a problem here in Iran. Iran's parliament approved in June
> 2022 that dst will no longer be implemented in the country and the
> time will not change from March 22, 2023. But today, the clock of all
> devices, including PCs, laptops and mobile phones of millions of
> Iranians, was changed and moved forward by one hour. And this
> situation has now created a big problem for millions of Iranians and
> they can no longer set the clock of their devices from ntp servers.

NTP can be used - you only need to update your OS so it knows the change
in the time zone for your country.

If that doesn't work, manually configure it and disable DST.

On 22/03/2023 17:37, David Woolley wrote:
> I wonder if this could be the result of an embargo, implemented by
> either Iran on the USA?  At least for open source software, the latter
> should not be an issue, as it can be obtained from other countries.
Looking at
<https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/daylight-saving-time-time-zone/bg-p/DSTBlog>
it would appear that Microsoft haven't acknowledged the existence of the
change, which may explain the problem with PCs, as Microsoft operating
systems reportedly dominate.
I think this may, in part, be because they are not permitted to provide
the Windows Update service to Iran, although I found it difficult to
find the exact current position with respect to that. They may also be
ignoring official Iranian government communications, or the government
may not have tried to communicate (the IANA update seems to have been
triggered by a private individual).
It seems to me that the government could have anticipated this and
provided guidance (e.g. to disable DST, or even registry patches to
manually correct the information - although not as easy to modify as the
IANA data, it looks to me that the Dynamic DST registry entries are
fairly straightforward).
Microsoft also prefer a lead time of at least a year, for such changes,
although I believe there would still have been interim change notices on
the above blog page, if they had accepted the existence of the change.
I haven't found a similar page for Apple.
In case the point is getting lost, none of this relates to NTP, which,
like GPS, etc., does not have time zones.

On 2023-03-23 15:45, David Woolley wrote:
> On 22/03/2023 17:37, David Woolley wrote:
>> I wonder if this could be the result of an embargo, implemented by
>> either Iran on the USA?  At least for open source software, the latter
>> should not be an issue, as it can be obtained from other countries.
>
> Looking at
> <https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/daylight-saving-time-time-zone/bg-p/DSTBlog>
> it would appear that Microsoft haven't acknowledged the existence of the
> change, which may explain the problem with PCs, as Microsoft operating
> systems reportedly dominate.
>
> I think this may, in part, be because they are not permitted to provide
> the Windows Update service to Iran, although I found it difficult to
> find the exact current position with respect to that.  They may also be
> ignoring official Iranian government communications, or the government
> may not have tried to communicate (the IANA update seems to have been
> triggered by a private individual).
>
> It seems to me that the government could have anticipated this and
> provided guidance (e.g. to disable DST, or even registry patches to
> manually correct the information - although not as easy to modify as the
> IANA data, it looks to me that the Dynamic DST registry entries are
> fairly straightforward).
>
> Microsoft also prefer a lead time of at least a year, for such changes,
> although I believe there would still have been interim change notices on
> the above blog page, if they had accepted the existence of the change.
>
> I haven't found a similar page for Apple.
>
> In case the point is getting lost, none of this relates to NTP, which,
> like GPS, etc., does not have  time zones.

It seems that some versions of Windows don't include a named timezone
for Iran, however the Windows 2000 resource kit tool TzEdit can be used
to create one for any recent Windows version, and the result extracted
from the registry into one or two .reg files (if 2 files are extracted,
they can be combined using Notepad). Someone in Iran could do that and
publish the resulting file, and as this would all be done inside Iran,
no export or import sanctions should be directly violated (not counting
any violation of sanctions already done to obtain the products).

Enjoy

Jakob
--
Jakob Bohm, CIO, Partner, WiseMo A/S. https://www.wisemo.com
Transformervej 29, 2860 Søborg, Denmark. Direct +45 31 13 16 10
This public discussion message is non-binding and may contain errors.
WiseMo - Remote Service Management for PCs, Phones and Embedded

On 23/03/2023 14:45, David Woolley wrote:
> Microsoft also prefer a lead time of at least a year, for such changes

It would appear that Lebanon has made a change with less than 3 days
notice. They didn't inform IANA, so again they had to rely on private
individuals. The IANA change (in 2023b) was made with just over a day
to spare, but it will probably take weeks for OS maintainers to issue
the update. Microsoft may well be unaware, but even if made aware, it
is very unlikely that they will issue an update before it is too late.

(In fact there seems to be an internal dispute in the country as to
whether the change has happened, see
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-65079574>.)

Again this is not an NTP problem, as NTP times are always UTC and
converted by the OS.