Thanks Paul and Zefram (and Brian via PM). I really do appreciate all the time you're spending on educating me about the TZdb and its use. I'm almost reaching the state of 'data overload'! :-) I have now contacted my website hosting service to ask them about what I can and cannot do on their server, and the brief answer was (a) CAN: "create a shell script to manipulate the data and create new files under your hosting service on the server", and (b) CANNOT: "its possible to run .exe on the Linux server but some additional package installation needed. However, we can't install this package on the server as your website is hosted in the shared server environment." So that rules out running zic, zdump and any such programs. All I can do is run shell commands. Fortunately the typical Linux shell seems to be pretty competent, including wget, unzip/untar commands, and this might be enough to have my TZdb mirror running autonomously without me having to do anything (after setting it up with a script, of course). So what I envisage my server doing, perhaps weekly (using Cronjob), is: 1. Check if tzdata-latest.tar.gz has changed, and download it if so; 2. If a new version was downloaded, unpack it to the individual files into my TZdb web page directory; 3. Copy the rule files to a single file: 'cp africa antarctica asia australasia europe northamerica southamerica zoneData.txt' (Yes, I understand that's not the full set of data files, but it is the subset that I need for my purpose, as Zefram inferred.) So now comes my next beginner's question (not being a Linux user), concerning steps 1 and 2 above. Looking through the wget manual, this method appears to show promise (thanks to Brian for this suggestions): wget -N ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/tzdata-latest.tar.gz But what is not clear in the manual is how I check if a newer file has been downloaded. They talk about the error codes returned by wget, but without explaining explicitly what is returned when wget (a) finds the files the same and doesn't download anything, or (b) finds a newer version and downloads it. If these situations produce different error codes, I can use an 'if' statement in my script to process the new data iff a new file arrives. Not wanting to load too many questions into one mail (nor overload my addled brain!), I'll leave till later a summary of how I propose to handle the clock-end firmware interaction with my 'TZdb server'. Regards, Daniel