- We're in America/Los_Angeles, and Moodle's timezone is set to that in Admin > Variables.
- Timezone data is pretty up-to-date: rpm -q tzdata = tzdata-2006m-3.el4.
- Moodle version is 1.6.3 (2006050530).
- Server OS is RedHat ES 4 with SELinux enabled. PHP is 4.3.9; MySQL is 4.1.20.
- Our /moodle/lib/timezone.txt file is relatively current, but has no entries for the U.S. 2007 switch--last entry is for 2006.
The problem: the availability of activities after the new US Daylight Saving Time switch is off by an hour. That is, the times shown in the calendar and on each activity's page are correct, but students can't actually open them until one hour after the scheduled time (there's no button available to actually start a quiz or submit an assignment).
I tested this by setting up several activities with different dates of availability (March 9th--before DST, and March 12th--after) while the server clock was still on standard time. I then set the server's clock ahead to March 12th at noon, logged in, and tried to open a quiz that was scheduled to become available at that time, with no luck. Originally, I assumed this was due to the new effective date for DST, but in fact an activity set to start on April 9th had the same problem, so I don't think it's the starting date shift.
Am I missing an obvious step here? My understanding from the exhaustive discussion in this forum and others was that using the named time zones should "just work." But obviously, I may be missing something on my server that's required for this to work CORRECTLY.
To reiterate: the server's time zone in the Moodle application (Admin > Variables > Time zone) is set to America/Los_Angeles. I've done tests with users' profiles set to both Server's local time and America/Los_Angeles, and get the same results.
(And just in case you're wondering, I was moving the time backward and forward on a test instance of Moodle, not our production server.
Anyone have any thoughts?
David Walton
Lane Community College
