I have a wordpress website which suddenly stopped working today. When I look at the logs I see and error:
[error] [client 50.78.108.177] PHP Fatal error: strtotime(): Timezone database is corrupt - this should never happen!
After reading up on google one person said that they discovered a permissions problem in /usr/share/zoneinfo. I tried changing the permissions to 777, 775, 770 and I still keep on getting the same error. I am running php PHP 5.3.2 on Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS. Any suggestions or recommendations would be helpful.If all else fails I'm going to try downgrading to an earlier version of php but I wanted to try other things before doing that.
thanks, Timnit
Update
just in case it helps: the error points to strtotime
in the function below
function mysql2date( $dateformatstring, $mysqlstring, $translate = true ) {
$m = $mysqlstring;
if ( empty( $m ) )
return false;
if ( 'G' == $dateformatstring )
return strtotime( $m . ' +0000' );
$i = strtotime( $m );
if ( 'U' == $dateformatstring )
return $i;
if ( $translate )
return date_i18n( $dateformatstring, $i );
else
return date( $dateformatstring, $i );
}
Update#2:
for now I have fixed the problem by simply having the function above return false;
without performing anything. However I still haven't figured out the root cause of the problem.
update#3:
var_dump($dateformatstring)
string(5) "d.m.y" string(1) "m" string(5) "d.m.y" string(1) "m" string(5) "d.m.y" string(1) "m"
var_dump($mysqlstring)
string(19) "2011-10-20 05:35:01" string(19) "2011-10-20 05:35:01" string(19) "2011-10-20 05:25:22" string(19) "2011-10-20 05:25:22" string(19) "2011-10-19 05:10:06" string(19) "2011-10-19 05:10:06"
update#4:
there is another code snippet that is generating the error log below:
PHP Fatal error: date(): Timezone database is corrupt - this should never happen! in /srv/www/motionthink.com/public_html/wp-admin/includes/class-wp-filesystem-direct.php on line 346, referer: wp_root_directory/wp-admin/plugins.php?plugin_status=upgrade
309 function dirlist($path, $include_hidden = true, $recursive = false) {
310 if ( $this->is_file($path) ) {
311 $limit_file = basename($path);
312 $path = dirname($path);
313 } else {
314 $limit_file = false;
315 }
316
317 if ( ! $this->is_dir($path) )
318 return false;
319
320 $dir = @dir($path);
321 if ( ! $dir )
322 return false;
323
324 $ret = array();
325
326 while (false !== ($entry = $dir->read()) ) {
327 $struc = array();
328 $struc['name'] = $entry;
329
330 if ( '.' == $struc['name'] || '..' == $struc['name'] )
331 continue;
332
333 if ( ! $include_hidden && '.' == $struc['name'][0] )
334 continue;
335
336 if ( $limit_file && $struc['name'] != $limit_file)
337 continue;
338
339 $struc['perms'] = $this->gethchmod($path.'/'.$entry);
340 $struc['permsn'] = $this->getnumchmodfromh($struc['perms']);
341 $struc['number'] = false;
342 $struc['owner'] = $this->owner($path.'/'.$entry);
343 $struc['group'] = $this->group($path.'/'.$entry);
344 $struc['size'] = $this->size($path.'/'.$entry);
345 $struc['lastmodunix']= $this->mtime($path.'/'.$entry);
346 $struc['lastmod'] = date('M j',$struc['lastmodunix']);
347 $struc['time'] = date('h:i:s',$struc['lastmodunix']);
348 $struc['type'] = $this->is_dir($path.'/'.$entry) ? 'd:'f';
349
Update#5:
doing a php -i | fgrep -i date
returns
Build Date => Dec 13 2011 18:43:02
date date/time support => enabled date.default_latitude => 31.7667 => 31.7667 date.default_longitude => 35.2333 => 35.2333 date.sunrise_zenith => 90.583333 => 90.583333 date.sunset_zenith => 90.583333 => 90.583333 date.timezone => no value => no value
then I edited the php.ini file to set the timezone to "America/Los Angeles" and got this output
date/time support => enabled
date.default_latitude => 31.7667 => 31.7667
date.default_longitude => 35.2333 => 35.2333
date.sunrise_zenith => 90.583333 => 90.583333
date.sunset_zenith => 90.583333 => 90.583333
date.timezone => America/Los_Angeles => America/Los_Angeles
I then restarted apache2. I still get the error
The problem was file permissions. I gave the apache2 user read & execute access to usr/share/zoneinfo and etc/localtime. Before, I hadn't set the parents of local time to the right permissions as well. i.e. I only changed the permissions of localtime and zoneinfo without changing the permissions of their parent directories. So stupid! Stepping away from a problem and getting back to it is always useful.