bizarre problem involving phpsuexec and sessions

[djedery]

Here's a good one:

Website is working fine. We decide to enable phpsuexec. Recompile apache.

Suddenly, formerly happy website is no longer happy. I load the website in IE, and see the following errors:

Warning: session_start(): open(/tmp/sess_28dda24d3f8863cebbb8243d6f60543d, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13) in /home/syslist/public_html/Includes/global.inc.php on line 117

Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /home/syslist/public_html/Includes/global.inc.php:117) in /home/syslist/public_html/Includes/global.inc.php on line 117

Warning: Unknown(): open(/tmp/sess_28dda24d3f8863cebbb8243d6f60543d, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13) in Unknown on line 0

Warning: Unknown(): Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/tmp) in Unknown on line 0

Now here's where it gets interesting: the sysadmin loads the website in Firefox and says he isn't getting any errors. Sure enough, I load firefox -- no errors.

How the heck is a server-side permission problem only visible in IE, not Firefox????

[dalecosp]

Heh, seems MSIE can screw up anything, eh?

Try a couple other browsers, you might learn something interesting (but I doubt it). Opera? Galeon? Konqueror? Mozilla (the big monster)?

It seems that if the issue really is browser dependent, it could only be one of two things. Either a problem with setting the session cookie (which doesn't seem at all likely to me), or you had a problem, IE cached it, and hasn't bothered to recheck the page. You might clean out your "Temporary Internet Files" and try again.

But, the odds are good you've already tried that. As you say, it seems a little crazy ...