Hey all, I have installed OTRS 3.0.9 and everything is working great except for ONE thing that is driving me batty! Here is some background on the problem and hopefully someone else has fallen into this dark abyss and found a way to illuminate the darkness and escape!
My otrs install is running on a Centos 5.4 OpenVZ VPS. Now this is a issue because there is no way to sync time in the container as it's synced to the host node. Well, the host node is physically in the EDT zone same as I am, but the server time is NOT set to local time, its set to GMT which is showing -5 hrs offset. However, if I set the VPS TZ to my zone, whether I enable or disable UTC, it keeps returning UTC and ignores the TZ setting. BTW, I did contact the ISP and they're response was "The host node has ntp running on it. What else do you want?". Well googling turns up that this is a common problem within OpenVZ containers and there are a bunch of hacks, and it's a crap shoot whether they will work or not, depending on how the container itself and the host node are configured. Anyway, back to the problem. By messing around with different setting for the timezone I found that setting my zone to GMT-1 it gives me the correct local time. Hooray! All should be right with the world now! WRONG!!

I started configuring my autoresponders, and when sending an email, low and behold, the time on the autoresponder email as well as my notification email are all off by -5 hours!!! Oy. So now I have tickets happening in the past! Big problem, especially when sent to an end user. Talk about confusion! So I start poking around. I check the "tickets" table. Hmm...creation date and time ARE correct! No offset! So I configure postfix to use localtime to be safe. Watch the postfix log as I send an email....Time of email ALSO correct in the logs! No offset there either! WTF??? So I start messing in OTRS system config Time settings. No matter WHAT I change ANYTHING to, enable, disable, change offset, NOTHING affects the time of the emails! Remember, the date and times in the tickets table IS correct! I even tried adding the {TZ} setting on the Kernel->Config.pm file, still nothing!! EVERYTHING I check has the proper time (database, system, postix, etc.) so WHERE is this problem coming from?? Does anyone have ANY ideas? It's making me absolutely crazy, and I cant have emails being sent that say 5 hours earlier than they were created.

TIA to all!
Kevin