sessions, php.ini & 644 permission

rooks

Hi,

First off thanks for all the help Ive received on here so far, it's been crucial & much appreciated.

I have been trying to get sessions to work both locally & in a test area of my website but with no luck. I have been advised by my webhost to do the following:

"create a custom php.ini file with the php values you need & place this in every directory that needs to use this. This file should have the following permissions: 644 permissions with the owner cpanelusername:cpanelusername. If we take your cpanel username to be bobbob1, your php.ini file should look like this in your file manager or ftp client: -rw-r--r-- 1 bobbob1 bobbob1 21 Nov 20 18:57 php.ini.
Once your php.ini file has been created you can populate with the php configuration values you need to override on the server"

I don't understand what this means. What I have done so far is copy the php.ini file from my C:\xampp\php dir into my site dir, changed session.save_path to "C:/windows/temp" & uploaded this up to my site in the same folder as my php session files but when I try to use the pages I am getting:
"
Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: open(C:/windows/temp/sess_e8a16891fb05e598d0da9930af12d57b, O_RDWR) failed: No such file or directory (2) in /home/mydomain/public_html/testarea/sessions1.php"

Firstly I do have a C:/windows/temp folder but then I started thinking 'hang on maybe this is where the server thinks it should be looking on the server for the stored session info'. so my first question is what should I put here? C:/windows/temp ? or something like mydomain/myfolder

Secondly I don't know how to look for or change the php.ini file's permissions to 644 as instructed by my host. I use Dreamweaver & have never come across this.

For what it's worth I also got this message

"Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /home/mydomain/public_html/testarea/sessions1.php:2) in /home/mydomain/public_html/testarea/sessions1.php on line 2"

but I don't think it's relevant to the main problem, maybe just a result of me refreshing the page or dodgy coding.

Anyway any help much appreciated, thanks a lot

Col

dagon

i'm surprised that any 'normal' web host requires any special settings for sessions, its a very standard php feature.

what happens with out your custom php.ini on your host?

did you copy a php.ini from a windows to a linux install?

bradgrafelman

rooks wrote:
Firstly I do have a C:/windows/temp folder but then I started thinking 'hang on maybe this is where the server thinks it should be looking on the server for the stored session info'.

PHP is a server-side language. Why would the server be looking through the client's temporary directory for files?

rooks wrote:
so my first question is what should I put here? C:/windows/temp ?

That path doesn't make any sense on a *nix operating system's file system, so I would advise against such a choice.

rooks wrote:
or something like mydomain/myfolder

Er... well you should simply use a path that makes sense. A path such as "mydomain/myfolder" is a relative path that is going to change for every directory where you have a PHP script... your session files would be scattered throughout every subdirectory of your site.

As such, you should instead use an absolute path. What the valid path may be depends on how the server is configured (e.g. why can't you just use /tmp like normal? otherwise, you'll have to make a similar 'tmp' directory inside your home directory).

rooks

Thanks for the replies. To answer your questions. comments

what happens with out your custom php.ini on your host?

nothing happens - I set up a couple of simple scripts to add a counter each time I visited but they did not increase, then i read this on the host pages:

We have recently updated many of our shared hosting servers to php 5 with phpSuExec enabled. This update was essential for security and allows our customers to take advantages of all the new features of php 5. While the vast majority of our customers will not be affected by this update, you may find that some features no longer work on our shared servers.

Most notably, users are not able to have php flags in their .htaccess file. Having php flags in .htaccess files is a common cause of internal server errors on servers with phpSuExec enabled. One way around this is to create a custom php.ini file with the php values you need

NB full article is here:
http://help.justhost.com/questions/76/How+do+I+setup+custom+php.ini+settings%3F

did you copy a php.ini from a windows to a linux install?

er yes I think so. I am running windows 7, my servers are linux

Why would the server be looking through the client's temporary directory for files?

I changed this because when investigating this issue this advice came up a lot on forums etc but not once did I come across anything advising to change this to the path on the server. To be fair I did mention that I had my doubts about this in my original post.

I should mention that my host uses cpanel - not sure if that means getting this to work might be slightly easier. Also I could post some phpinfo() values if that might help (and is safe to do so)

Thanks

Col