Network Working Group E. Lear

Network Working Group E. Lear
Request for Comments: 4833 Cisco Systems GmbH
Updates: 2132 P. Eggert
Category: Standards Track UCLA
April 2007

Timezone Options for DHCP

Status of This Memo

This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007).

Abstract

Two common ways to communicate timezone information are POSIX 1003.1
timezone strings and timezone database names. This memo specifies
DHCP options for each of those methods. The DHCPv4 time offset
option is deprecated.

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RFC 4833 Timezone Options for DHCP April 2007

1. Introduction

This memo specifies a means to provide hosts with more accurate
timezone information than was previously available. To do this we
make use of two commonly used methods to configure timezones:

o POSIX TZ strings

o Reference to the name of the time zone entry in the TZ Database

POSIX [1] provides a standard for how to express timezone information
in a character string. Use of such a string can provide accuracy for
at least one transition into and out of daylight saving time (DST),
and possibly for more transitions if the transitions are regular
enough (e.g., "second Sunday in March at 02:00 local time").
However, for accuracy over longer periods that involve daylight-
saving rule changes or other irregular changes, a more detailed
mechanism is necessary.

The TZ Database [7] that is used in many operating systems provides
backwards consistency and accuracy for almost all real-world
locations since 1970. The TZ database also attempts to provide a
stable set of human readable timezone identifiers. In addition, many
systems already make use of the TZ database, and so the names used
are a de facto standard. Because the TZ database contains more
information, one can heuristically derive the POSIX information from
a TZ identifier (see [10] for an example), but the converse is not
true.

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [2].

1.1. Related Work

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) [3] provides a means for
hosts to receive configuration information relating to their current
location within an IP version 4 network. [5] similarly does so for IP
version 6 networks. RFC 2132 [4] specifies an option to provide
client timezone information in the form of an offset in seconds from
UTC. The information provided in that option is insufficient for the
client to determine whether it is in daylight saving time, and when
to change into and out of daylight saving time. In order for the
client to properly represent local wall clock time in a consistent
and accurate fashion the DHCP server would have to time lease
expirations of affected clients to the beginning or end of DST, thus
effecting a self stress test (to say the least) at the appointed
hour.

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RFC 4833 Timezone Options for DHCP April 2007

In addition, an offset is not sufficient to determine the actual
timezone in which a client resides, and thus there is no means to
derive a human readable abbreviation such as "EST" or "EDT".

VTIMEZONE elements are defined in the iCalendar specification [9].
Fully specified they provide a level of accuracy similar to the TZ
database. However, because there is currently no global registry of
VTIMEZONE TZIDs (although one has been proposed; see [8]), complete
accuracy requires that a full entry must be specified. To achieve
the same information would range from 300 octets upwards with no
particular bound. Furthermore, at the time of this writing the
authors are aware of no operating system that natively takes
advantage of VTIMEZONE entries. It might be possible to include an
option for a TZURL. However, in a cold start environment, it will be
bad enough that devices are stressing the DHCP server, and perhaps
unwise to similarly afflict other components.

2. New Timezone Options for DHCPv4

The following two options are defined for DHCPv4:

PCode Len TZ-POSIX String
+-----+-----+------------------------------+
| 100 | N | IEEE 1003.1 String |
+-----+-----+------------------------------+

TCode Len TZ-Database String
+-----+-----+------------------------------+
| 101 | N | Reference to the TZ Database |
+-----+-----+------------------------------+

Per RFC 2939 [6], IANA allocated PCode (100) and TCode (101).

Len is the one-octet value of the length of the succeeding string for
each option.

The string values that follow Len are described below. Note that
they are NOT terminated by an ASCII NULL.

3. New Timezone Options for DHCPv6

The semantics and content of the DHCPv6 encoding of these options are
exactly the same as the encoding described for DHCPv4, other than
necessary differences between the way options are encoded in DHCPv4
and DHCPv6.

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RFC 4833 Timezone Options for DHCP April 2007

Specifically, the DHCPv6 new timezone options are described below:

0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| OPTION_NEW_POSIX_TIMEZONE | option-length |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| TZ POSIX String |
| ... |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

option-code: OPTION_NEW_POSIX_TIMEZONE(41)

option-length: the number of octets of the TZ POSIX String Index
described below.

0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| OPTION_NEW_TZDB_TIMEZONE | option-length |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| TZ Name |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

option-code: OPTION_NEW_TZDB_TIMEZONE(42)

option-length: the number of octets of the TZ Database String Index
described below.

4. The TZ POSIX String

TZ POSIX string is a string suitable for the TZ variable as specified
by [1] in Section 8.3, with the exception that a string may not begin
with a colon (":"). This string is NOT terminated by an ASCII NULL.
Here is an example:

EST5EDT4,M3.2.0/02:00,M11.1.0/02:00

In this case, the string is interpreted as a timezone that is
normally five hours behind UTC, and four hours behind UTC during DST,
which runs from the second Sunday in March at 02:00 local time
through the first Sunday in November at 02:00 local time. Normally
the timezone is abbreviated "EST" but during DST it is abbreviated
"EDT".

Clients and servers implementing other timezone options MUST support
this option for basic compatibility.

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RFC 4833 Timezone Options for DHCP April 2007

5. The TZ Name

TZ Name is the name of a Zone entry in the database commonly referred
to as the TZ database. Specifically, in the database's textual form,
the string refers to the name field of a zone line. In order for
this option to be useful, the client must already have a copy of the
database. This string is NOT terminated with an ASCII NULL.

An example string is Europe/Zurich.

Clients must already have a copy of the TZ Database for this option
to be useful. Configuration of the database is beyond the scope of
this document. A client that supports this option SHOULD prefer this
option to POSIX string if it recognizes the TZ Name that was
returned. If it doesn't recognize the TZ Name, the client MUST
ignore this option.

6. Use of the Timezone String(s) Returned from the Server

This specification presumes the DHCP server has some means of
identifying which timezone the client is in. One obvious approach
would be to associate a subnet or group of subnets with a timezone,
and respond with this option accordingly.

When considering which option to implement on a client, one must
choose between the TZ Name, which should be easier for users to
configure and which provides accuracy over longer historical periods,
and the TZ POSIX string, which does not require regular updating of a
copy of the TZ Database. The TZ Name is better for most uses, in
particular those cases where the timezone name might persist in a
database for long periods of time, but the TZ POSIX string may be
more suitable for small-footprint applications that are expertly
maintained.

So that clients need not request both options, servers who implement
either timezone option SHOULD implement the other one as well. This
association can be established by the server's administrator. A
basic server can transmit option values to the client without parsing
or validating them. A more advanced server might have a copy of the
TZ database and validate TZ names against this copy, or derive TZ
POSIX strings heuristically from TZ names to simplify administration.

As a matter of practicality, the client will use this information at
its discretion to configure the current timezone in which it resides.

It will periodically be necessary for a DHCP server to update the
timezone string, based on administrative changes made by local
jurisdictions (say, for instance, counties in Indiana). While the

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RFC 4833 Timezone Options for DHCP April 2007

authors do not expect this to be a lower bound on a lease time in the
vast majority of cases, there may be times when anticipation of a
change dictates prudence, as certain governments give little if any
notification.

The effect of a changed timezone on client applications is not
specified by this memo, but it may be helpful to note common problems
in this area. Often, client applications consult the timezone
setting only during process initialization, or inherit the setting
from a parent process, so existing processes on a client may ignore a
timezone change returned from the server. Sometimes it is normal and
expected for processes on the same client to have different timezone
settings (e.g., remote logins), and so client implementations should
consider these ramifications of changing timezone settings of
existing processes.

7. The New Timezone Option and Lease Times

When a lease has expired and new information is not forthcoming, the
client MAY continue to use timezone information returned by the
server. This follows the principle of least astonishment.

8. Deprecation of Time Offset Option

Because this option provides a superset of functionality to the
previous IPv4 time offset option (tag 2), and in order to maintain
consistency between IPv4 and IPv6 implementation, the older option is
deprecated. Current implementations that support the time offset
IPv4 option SHOULD implement this option also. Other implementations
SHOULD implement this option, and SHOULD NOT implement the time
offset IPv4 option. As a matter of transition, clients that already
use the time offset option MAY request the time offset option and the
timezone option.

9. Security Considerations

An attacker could provide erroneous information to a client. It is
possible that someone might miss a meeting or otherwise show up
early, or that heavy machinery or other critical functions might act
at the wrong time or fail to act. If clients have job processing
tools, such as cron that operate on wall clock time, it is possible
that certain jobs could be triggered either earlier or later, or even
repeated or skipped entirely if scheduled during a DST transition.
In such cases, the client operating system might do well to confirm
timezone changes with a human.

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RFC 4833 Timezone Options for DHCP April 2007

Clients using the POSIX option should beware of any time zone setting
specifying unusual characters (e.g., control characters) in the
standard or daylight-saving abbreviations, as this might well trigger
security-relevant bugs in applications.

Clients using the POSIX option should also be suspicious of any
timezone setting whose UTC offset exceeds 25 hours (the POSIX limit,
if the default daylight-saving offset is used). As of this writing,
the maximum UTC offset is 14 hours in practice, but governments may
extend this somewhat in the future.

10. IANA Considerations

The IANA has allocated DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 option codes for this
purpose and references this document.

The IANA has annotated the time offset IPv4 option (tag 2) as
deprecated, with a reference to this document.

11. Acknowledgments

This document specifies a means to exchange timezone information.
The hard part is actually collecting changes to the various databases
from scattered sources around the world. The many volunteers on the
mailing list [email protected] have done this nearly thankless
task for many years. Thanks also go to Ralph Droms, Bernie Volz, Ted
Lemon, Lisa Dusseault, John Hawkinson, Stig Venaas, and Simon
Vaillancourt for their efforts to improve this work.

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RFC 4833 Timezone Options for DHCP April 2007

12. References

12.1. Normative References

[1] "Standard for Information Technology - Portable Operating
System Interface (POSIX) - Base Definitions",
IEEE Std 1003.1-2004, December 2004.

[2] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement
Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

[3] Droms, R., "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol", RFC 2131,
March 1997.

[4] Alexander, S. and R. Droms, "DHCP Options and BOOTP Vendor
Extensions", RFC 2132, March 1997.

[5] Droms, R., Bound, J., Volz, B., Lemon, T., Perkins, C., and M.
Carney, "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv6
(DHCPv6)", RFC 3315, July 2003.

[6] Droms, R., "Procedures and IANA Guidelines for Definition of
New DHCP Options and Message Types", BCP 43, RFC 2939,
September 2000.

[7] Eggert, P. and A. Olson, "Sources for Time Zone and Daylight
Saving Time Data", <http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm>.

12.2. Informational References

[8] Vaillancourt, S., "Calconnect.org TC Timezone Technical
Committee: Timezone Registry and Service Recommendations",
April 2006.

[9] Dawson, F. and Stenerson, D., "Internet Calendaring and
Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar)", RFC 2445,
November 1998.

[10] Eggert, P. and E. Reingold, "cal-dst.el --- calendar functions
for daylight savings rules", <http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/
viewcvs/*checkout*/emacs/lisp/calendar/cal-dst.el?root=emacs>.

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RFC 4833 Timezone Options for DHCP April 2007

Authors' Addresses

Eliot Lear
Cisco Systems GmbH
Glatt-com
Glattzentrum, ZH CH-8301
Switzerland

Phone: +41 1 878 9200
EMail: [email protected]

Paul Eggert
UCLA
Computer Science Department
4532J Boelter Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095
USA

Phone: +1 310 825 3886
EMail: [email protected]

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RFC 4833 Timezone Options for DHCP April 2007

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