The behavior you are reporting makes it sound like the time zone tables are not loaded. (The default installation of MySQL doesn't load these tables.)
Instructions for loading the MySQL time zone tables are here:
1http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/time-zone-support.html
If those tables aren't loaded, then you won't be able to use named time zones, but time zone values like "+0:00
" will work.
To keep the instance time_zone "set" at startup, you'll want to set the default_time_zone
variable in the mysqld section of the my.cnf file.