Explicitly set the time zone in MySQL session about pmacct

[paololucente]

Hi Tore ( @toreanderson ),

It appears we were going ahead in parallel to resolve this, haha. I liked your original proposal, enforcing UTC timestamp on the current session. I have just implemented it with the commit above -- it appears to work good for me. I also see your alternative suggestion of using TIMESTAMP instead of DATETIME: i will find some room for it in the docs as an alternative.

Paolo

[toreanderson]

I found a way to handle this issue that does not require changes to pmacct nor admin privileges on the database server.

It is to use TIMESTAMP instead of DATETIME, changing the schema as follows:

-    stamp_inserted DATETIME NOT NULL,
-    stamp_updated DATETIME,
+    stamp_inserted TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
+    stamp_updated TIMESTAMP NULL,

This makes the database server store the timestamps as UTC internally, resolving all ambiguity.