Am I screwed? Server change new time zone

Dolemite50

Hi,

I just switched a very large site to godaddy.com and I noticed that the servers time zone is set to GMT. I found some posts that said u can do stuff like add to the timestamp and things like that but we are talking about over 100 pages with daily winners, submissions, forum, daily voting, etc so there is an ocean of work that needs to be done.

For example, this code for a page counter:

if ($stime == date('Ymd'))

Which should be true but since the server is set to GMT and is 8 hours ahed, it doesnt.

To change this for every instance of timed activity on the site is a major overhaul so I'm hoping somebody may have a good resolution.

Thanks alot.

devinemke

i live in NYC, my host is in LA. what i do is have a master file [man]include[/man]d on every page that among other things does this:

<?php
$timestamp = time();

if ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == 'localhost')
{
			// set a bunch a vars for local dev
			$server = 'localhost';
			$user = 'xxx';
			$password = 'xxx';
			$upload_path = '/path/to/local/files/';
}
else
{
			// set a bunch a vars for live server
			$server = 'yyy.remote.com';
			$user = 'yyy';
			$password = 'yyy';
			$upload_path = '/path/to/remote/files/';
			$timestamp += 10800;
}
?>

now every date/time operation i do relates to the $timestamp var which will be set for the correct timezone. i realize this doesn't help your current problem of fixing all your code but it's just a suggestion for the future to make your code more portable.

Weedpacket

What I've taken to doing is storing all dates and times internally as UTC; and then converting them to the server's local timezone. here is a snippet that calculates the difference in hours between local timezone (as told by the server) and UTC.

Of course, you're saying your server is already configured to UTC (eight hours ahead of what? LA? NYC? If the latter, then it would hardly matter if the server's clock was set to UTC or local time - either would be wrong.)

One question is: what is the timezone you want to use, and why is it significant? Can't you just leave it at UTC?

Dolemite50

Thanks alot guys,

One question is: what is the timezone you want to use, and why is it significant? Can't you just leave it at UTC?

I would like to use either PST or EST. Since GMT is 8 hours ahead (I think) because in instances like this:
INSERT INTO table set stime = now()
then later:
if ($stime == date('Ymd'))

It does not set as true because $stime is showing 20041128 and date(Ymd) is showing 20041129 because it is 8 hours ahead.

Sorry, but I'm pretty lost here.

PHPMagician

Is the DB server at a different time-zone to the web host? If so, instead of using the mysql now() function, simply use you're date call within the query also. I don't think that is you're problem somehow though.