Setting Time Zone
Applies to: Navigator and Communicator (all versions)Operating Systems: Windows 3.x, Windows 95, and Windows NT 4.0.
Problem Symptoms: "My times are wrong by one or more hours on mail or news messages I send."
Solutions:
Windows 95/NT 4.0
- Double click the time in the lower right corner of the system tray
- In the dialog box that pops up select the *Time Zone* tab
- Use the drop down menu to select the correct entry for "your" TIME ZONE
- Also, Check the box marked Daylight Savings Time
- Then click OK to save it
Windows 3.1
You need to tell the system the time zone used when you set your PC clock.A standard way of doing this (and the method expected by Netscape Navigator2.0) is a line in your autoexec.bat file:
SET TZ=aaahhbbb
aaa is the abbreviation for your standard time,
hh is the number of hours WEST of Greenwich,
bbb (which can be omitted) is the abbreviation for your daylight (summer)time zone.
Examples:
(GMT ) set tz=GMT000 Greenwich Mean Time; London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Casablanca, Monrovia =0
( -1:00) set tz=+01+01 Azores, CapeVerde Is. =60
( -2:00) set tz=+02+02 Mid-Atlantic =120
( -3:00) set tz=+03+03 Buenos Aires,Rio de Janiero,E. South America =180
( -3:30) set tz=Nwf+03:30 Newfoundland =210
( -4:00) set tz=AST+04ADT Atlantic Time (Canada) ,Caracas,La Paz =240
( -5:00) set tz=EST+05EDT Eastern Time (US & Canada),Bogota, Lima, Indiana (East) =300
( -6:00) set tz=CST+06CDT Central Time (US & Canada),Mexico City, Tegucigalpa, Saskatchewan =360
( -7:00) set tz=MST+07MDT Mountain Time (US & Canada),Arizona =420
( -8:00) set tz=PST+08PDT Pacific Time (US & Canada),San Francisco, LA, Tijuana =480
( -9:00) set tz=+09+09 Alaska =540
(-10:00) set tz=+10+10 Hawaii =600
(-11:00) set tz=+11+11 Midway Island,Samoa =660
(-12:00) set tz=+12+12 Enewetak,Kwajalein,Dateline =720
( +1:00) set tz=MEZ-01 Paris, Berlin,Madrid, Stockholm, Rome,W. Europe =-60
( +2:00) set tz=OEZ-02 Athens, Helsinki,Istanbul,E. Europe, Harare, Pretoria,South Africa, Israel =-120
( +3:00) set tz=-03-03 Baghdad, Kuwait,Nairobi, Riyadh,Saudi , Moscow, St. Petersburg =-180
( +3:30) Tehran,Iran =-210
( +4:00) set tz=-04-04 Abu Dhabi,Muscat, Tbilisi, Kazan, Volgograd,Arabia =-240
( +4:30) Kabul,Afghanistan =-270
( +5:00) set tz=-05-05 Islamabad,Karachi, Sverdlovsk, Tashkent,West Asia =-300
( +5:30) Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, New Delhi, Colombo,India =-330
( +6:00) set tz=-06-06 Alma Ata,Dhaka,Central Asia =-360
( +7:00) set tz=-07-07 Bangkok, Jakarta,Hanoi,Bangkok =-420
( +8:00) set tz=-08-08 Beijing, Chongqing,Urumqi, Hong Kong, Perth, Singapore =-480
( +9:00) set tz=-09-09 Tokyo, Osaka,Sapporo, Seoul, Yakutsk =-540( +9:30) set tz=???-09:30 Adelaide,Central Australia,Darwin =-570
( +10:00) set tz=-10-10 Brisbane, Melbourne,Sydney, Guam, Port Moresby, Vladivostok,West Pacific, Hobart =-600
( +11:00) set tz=-11-11 Magadan, SolomanIs., New Caledonia,Central Pacific =-660
( +12:00) set tz=-12-12 Fiji, Kamchatka,Marshall Is., Wellington, Auckland,New Zealand =-720
James Fuller has provided the following very good info:
> 1. When you post, News server sees your posting
> time and assumes it is in the local time zone unless
> your client says otherwise (which it normally only does
> if the TZ environment variable is set).
Every nntp and smtp message carries a timestamp in the "Date:" field whichincludes the date and time that the message was sent and the timezone offset,e.g., your message header says "Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 08:29:35 +0000".
If the sending program doesn't put a "Date:" field in the header, thensome servers refuse the message, others fill in the time that they getthe message. Note that this is just the transfer agent to which you originallysend it,-- from then on, it has a "Date:" field.
Most programs (and servers) use standard library functions (localtime()et al.) to get the timestamp value. Those functions use system calls tothe OS and maybe the TZ environment variable.
If the server has to fill in the "Date:" field, it doesn't have to assumeanything, it can just fill it in with its local time and offset, or asis more common, fill in the GMT time (a lot of the Unix and Internet worldruns on GMT).
In any case, the correct time gets stamped in the header. Unless, of course,your sending program puts the wrong time in the "Date:" field , which iswhat was happpening to me the past couple of days since I installed ServicePack 4 on NT 3.51.
Your sending software can always get the local time from a system call,but it may have a harder time getting the timeZONE information. 32-bitWindows OSes supposedly return this information from the appropriate systemcall. Unix does return it; old Windows and MS-DOS didn't have a clue, sosoftware developers basically had to depend on their compiler's libraryfunctions and TZ.
Because the use of TZ is relatively rare on MS-DOS and Windows, some software explicitly asks for timezone information in its setup and/or preferences(Pegasus, Free Agent, ...). This makes it immune to flaky interpretation of TZ by OS and/or library.
> 2. When you read a post, Navigator assumes you
> are in the same time zone as the news server, unless
> you have set TZ. The posting time of any message you
> see is adjusted accordingly.
No. If you don't have TZ set, you are imputed a California location. Yes.Netscape adjusts the header time according to the header offset and yourlocal offset (from TZ) to display the messages' posting times in your localtime.
> I have TZ=MEZ (for Switzerland), but the posting times
> I see don't seem to be correct.
For example, message from Bill Horne (in GA) shows:
> Date: Sun, 21 Apr 1996 23:56:27 -0400
> but we should be 6 hours apart. Anyone know
> what's going on?
You need a number in TZ (actually, the number is the only thing that really matters; the letters are just used as a label): TZ=MEZ-2 would be correct if you are 2 hours east of GMT. Whatever your TZ setting is doesn't affect Bill's. If yours is correct (MEZ-2) then you should see in the header pane beside his message 5:56 AM of the next day, which is your local clock's reading at the instant he sent the message in GA.
Isn't this fun? Jim Fuller
