note 8238 added to mktime

I've got an odd problem with this... Whenever I retrieve the date the time zone field reads /etc/localtime I'm a relative newbie to PHP, if someone could make a couple suggestions it'd be appreciated. I've been pouring through code trying to figure out why this is and am starting to believe that it's a misconfiguration on the server.. (unfortunately it's a virtual server; no root for me). is there anything i can do to force it to EST? http://www.php.net/manual/function.mktime.php