> + modern style timezone setting by country/city requires 800k - no way!

Hmm, last time I checked, /usr/share/zoneinfo could be .tar.gz'ed to about
70 KB... I guess it would be pretty easy to call tar from PHP to extract a
specific zone file (maybe the list of available zones would have to be
kept in a separate text file for convenience). OK, we'd have to include
tar, but built as a dynamic executable (not static as by default), it
shouldn't be bigger than about 100 KB either. So I think 220 KB (including
msntp) would be a fair tradeoff to get full timezone and NTP
functionality. And we might need tar for something else in the future
anyway. You might want to give this a try...

AFAIR you wouldn't have to mess with TZ that way - just copy/untar the
appropriate zone file to /etc/localtime, and that should do it.

Greets,

Manuel