Changing timezone on CentOS 5.5

I wanted to change the timezone of my CentOS server to be UTC-3 or -4.
I followed some instructions on the Internet, and did this first:

# rm /etc/localtime 
# ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/GMT-4 /etc/localtime

However, the clock (“date” command) now showed 4 hours more instead of
less. I tried something like:

# ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Atlantic/South_Georgia /etc/localtime

and that worked fine. At least for the system date and time. After
this, I rebooted the system to make sure everything will be alright
afterward. However, PHP’s date() now showed 4 hours more instead of
less. MySQL was ok. I got really confused by this, and I digged into
/etc/php.ini and changed the date.timezone setting to:

date.timezone = Atlantic/South_Georgia

And restarted Apache:

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

It seems to work fine now.

Tweet to @mbabuskov Milan Babuškov, 2010-09-25