Timezone issue with newer PHP versions

[mattpascoe]

I just updated my RedHat Enterprise Linux server 6 ONA server to the latest version of PHP (5.3.3-22.el6), using the latest ONA and build_bind 1.5

I keep having the following errors fill up the apache error log, and it seems unhappy about something in the build_bind module.

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PHP Warning: strtotime(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are required to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Asia/Jayapura' for 'CST/9.0/no DST' instead in /opt/ona/www/modules/build/build_bind.inc.php on line 394

I'm having to flush my logs out or it'll fill my /var to capacity, and tune PHP to show less errors.

I figure you can probably fix the issue though.

[mattpascoe]

for now I suspect you can put a 'data.timezone' setting in the php.ini to bypass this error. Need to determine a clean way of handling this.

[jaydio]

There's nothing to work around here since it's not an application specific issue. PHP requires the timezone to be explicitely defined since version 5.1.0. The behaviour you describe is documented here -> http://php.net/manual/en/function.date-default-timezone-set.php

Quote:

Since PHP 5.1.0 (when the date/time functions were rewritten), every call to a date/time function will
generate a E_NOTICE if the timezone isn't valid, and/or a E_WARNING message if using the system settings or the TZ environment variable.

[mattpascoe]

I'm inclined to do something like this: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date-default-timezone-set.php#113864

This way ONA will use the date_default_timezone_set function to set things properly but use a system level setting for the proper value. I don't want to have users explicitly set this in some ONA config somewhere.

Otherwise, bottom line is, people just need to configure their environment properly :)