NTP Server - DST Chile

Good afternoon:


I live in Chile and as some may know, time change for energy savings is quite hectic down here.

The government has recently decided to change back to winter time from May15th to August. Of course the Apple time servers (time.apple.com) do not take in account this random winter time adjustment. Nevertheless there is an online time server called ntp.shoa.cl managed from Chile that always updates itself very well.


My questions are the following:

- Can I add this server to the list of available servers through System Preferences ?

- Does this mean the time will always update itself from this server ?

- How does the time zone influence this server ? Should I leave it on Santiago, Chile ?


My idea of course is to set a server and never change it.


Thanks on advance for your help.

Stan.

MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7.4)

Posted on May 16, 2016 1:04 PM

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2 replies

May 16, 2016 2:16 PM in response to scherel

The NTP time servers serve out UT/UTC/Zulu time, and not local time. They don't know what time zone you're using.


You're going to need an update to your local timezone rules database. That can either be edited manually, or — pending an updated set of rules from Apple — set the offset manually in System Preferences > Date & Time > Time Zone, or (probably easier) from the command line.


From what I've seen of it, Chile has a habit of making last-minute changes — no pun intended — for DST. Which means everybody tends to be somewhat behind on distributing the most current set of timezone rules.


If you want details on how to do this, here's an overview from a few years ago — read the whole thing and the comments, as the Olsen database (formerly at elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub) moved to IANA several years ago. There's an old write-up I posted on this from a few years ago or another writeup, too. From that old write-up...


ls -lah /etc/localtime

zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2016


Based on a look around, it'll probably be the following manual offset, at least until your local Americas/Santiago definition catches up with the correct definitions:


sudo ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/GMT+4 /private/etc/localtime


But if that doesn't work, try GMT-4. (IIRC, POSIX tends to do the GMT offset direction, um, differently from everybody else.)


And again, if you decide to edit the databases directly and rebuild them with zic, the canonical rules database moved from the elsie server over to IANA.

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NTP Server - DST Chile

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