Time Zone: Can't get away from UTC

vermontitguy

Hi, I'm fairly new to osTicket. I can't seem to get my tickets to show anything other than the UTC time zone. I am in the Eastern US 'America/New_York' time zone. I've tried every suggested in https://howtohelpdesk.com/how-to-set-time-zone-in-osticket/ without success. Here are my particulars:

Any help appreciated.

KevinTheJedi

vermontitguy

I would not suggest using New York as the database timezone. Database timezone should be UTC so all dates and times can easily be converted to any timezone.

Cheers.

vermontitguy

KevinTheJedi Thank you. Changing the database timezone to UTC seems to have solved the problem. Now for some reason, the cron job is no longer fetching new tickets from the Google IMAP account. Could this be timezone related? Like maybe osTicket thinks it's too early to check for new email?

KevinTheJedi

vermontitguy

Do you have a cron job configured? We’re you using OAuth2 Modern Authentication for the email? If so you may need to get a new token and retest.

Cheers.

vermontitguy

KevinTheJedi Yes. I have a cron job configured. I also tried running cron.php from the Linux command prompt. And yes, I did get a new token for OAuth2. Still no new fetches. 🙁

KevinTheJedi

vermontitguy

Do you have any Mail Fetcher errors in System Logs?

Cheers.

vermontitguy

So I changed the DB to be UTC as suggested. I created a test ticket in the Agent panel since cron.php isn't getting mail. Here's what happened in the DB:

The now() command is showing UTC, but the timestamp on the ticket in ost_thread is showing my local EDT.
I've set the logging to DEBUG and both Cron Job and Auto Cron are appearing without errors.
Here's how the test ticket is showing up:

KevinTheJedi

vermontitguy

Sounds like the session timezone for MySQL is still set to local time. Please update the current session timezone in MySQL and retest.

Cheers.

vermontitguy

Here's what I've got in the MySQL server:

KevinTheJedi

vermontitguy

Yea I would set GLOBAL and SESSION time_zone and system_time_zone to UTC and retest.

Cheers.

vermontitguy

KevinTheJedi So it all appears to be working properly now. Cronjob is bringing in tickets, and timestamps look correct. However, changing system_time_zone means actually changing the Linux system time which seems like a sledgehammer fix that may break other systems that are running on the same server that are expecting local time. I'm just happy it's working now, but I think something might be wrong with how osTicket evaluates the time from the MySQL server.

KevinTheJedi

vermontitguy

That's fine then if you can't update system_time_zone. That's just the last resort it pulls from if others are set to SYSTEM.

Cheers.

vermontitguy

I'm grateful for all your help. Just FYI, I'm super impressed with osTicket. We migrated away from Zendesk to save money and started out piloting Spiceworks which was quite underwhelming.
Thanks for getting me on track.