PHP warnings and system timezone settings

If you experience or trigger an apache error log message like the following:

[Tue Mar 05 17:57:59 2013] [error] [client 10.1.0.11] PHP Warning:  strftime(): 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 the timezone 'UTC' for now, but please set date.timezone to select your timezone. in /var/www/html/cfmcweb/monitor/lib/answers.php on line 24, referer: http://10.0.1.11/cfmcweb/monitor/index.php

This error is triggered because thedate.timezone setting in the server’s php.ini file is not set or is disabled.

Edit the php.ini file which is located in the /etc/php.ini subdirectory and put in the following line for a machine setting on the east coast for example:

date.timezone = "America/New_York"

A complete list of date.timezones can be found at http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.america.php

You will need to restart your Apache server as the root user by typing “service httpd restart” for the new timezone settings to take effect.