I discovered yesterday that the www.linux.ie website wasn’t allowing logins for Niall Walsh to add a news item to the system. After some investigation I found that the values set in the $_SESSION array weren’t sticking – through some update the session.save_path in the php.ini was left pointing at /var/lib/php4 while that directory was replaced with /var/lib/php5!
It seems not only does php not fall back to using /tmp if the directory specified in session.save_path doesn’t exist, it doesn’t raise an error regarding the problem.
Suffice to say a quick reset has resolved the problem – logins on www.linux.ie are back to normal.