Dedicated Servers

How to set the default PHP.INI timezone

Messages in error_log: Please use the date.timezone setting, PHP Strict Standards:  strtotime() [<a href=’function.strtotime’>function.strtotime</a>]: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. Please use the date.timezone setting

The default timezone setting in your PHP.INI is not set.

Edit you PHP.INI using your favourite editor eg.

# vi /etc/php.ini

Change this:

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; date.timezone =

To this:

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
date.timezone = "Europe/London"

This will resolve the problem.

My server is not responding to PING requests

A ping can be used to change that your server is physically up and communicating across the network.

It is a small packet that is sent to the server and upon receipt the server sends a response back. Other routing information can also be determined from this packet response.

Unfortunately this information can be used by hackers to scan IP ranges for potentially hackable servers.

If a server is set not to respond to ping requests then it makes that server more secure by simply being less visible to scanners.

For this reason, we disable ICMP PING requests on all of our servers.