I recently came across a peculiar issue that meant dates and times were causing issues with a product we had developed within Australia. The issue being that within “Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5 (Tikanga)” the date within PHP was being read as EST instead of AEST/AEDT, however running “date” from the terminal or running “SELECT NOW()” from MySQL displayed the correct time.

[user@server ~]$ date
Wed Oct 14 22:24:20 EST 2009

[user@server ~]$ php -r'var_dump(date("r"));'
string(51) "Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:25:07 +1000 Australia/Melbourne"

[user@server ~]$ php -r'var_dump(date("r e"));var_dump(getenv("TZ"));var_dump(ini_get("date.timezone"));var_dump(date_default_timezone_get());';
string(51) "Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:25:07 +1000 Australia/Melbourne"
bool(false)
string(0) ""
string(19) "Australia/Melbourne"

[user@server ~]$ mysql -uuser -ppassword -e 'SELECT NOW();'
+---------------------+
| NOW()               |
+---------------------+
| 2009-10-14 22:26:12 |
+---------------------+

As you can see php incorrectly gets the time, being an hour off. Running the above on debian worked perfectly fine and comparing the zoneinfo matched my local machine.
[user@server ~]$ md5sum /etc/localtime && md5sum /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Sydney && md5sum /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Melbourne
85285c5495cd5b8834ab62446d9110a9 /etc/localtime
85285c5495cd5b8834ab62446d9110a9 /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Sydney
8a7f0f78d5a146db4bf865ca91cc1c42 /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Melbourne

After a fair amount of digging I ended up coming across the following ticket @478566. Amazingly the ticket is marked as “CLOSED WONTFIX”.

There were a few interesting points from some of the conversations I read.
” Alphabetic time zone abbreviations should not be used as unique identifiers for UTC offsets as they are ambiguous in practice. For example, “EST” denotes 5 hours behind UTC in English-speaking North America, but it denotes 10 or 11 hours ahead of UTC in Australia; and French-speaking North Americans prefer “HNE” to “EST”. twinsun”

Due to different locations in Australia having various interpretations of summer time with start/end dates and clock shifts. As well as the operating system not having zoneinfo data for DEST, AEDT etc (unless you create these yourself) it means you cannot rely on the correct time from php on redhat.

So far I have resorted to the following

[user@server ~]$ php -r ‘date_default_timezone_set(“Etc/GMT-11”); var_dump(date(“r”));’;
string(31) “Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:24:29 +1100”