Sessions directories missing after upgrade to 16.10 and php 7.1 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

[Cristiano Cumer]

Hello,

I updated my mahara installation to 16.10. At the same time I did an upgrade to from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 and to php 7.1.

Suddenly users where not able to login, I checked the error log and I found this:

2017/03/07 11:01:35 [error] 19414#19414: *100640 FastCGI sent in stderr: "PHP message: [WAR] 72 (auth/session.php:457) session_regenerate_id(): open(/data/maharadata/sessions/8/e/h/sess_8ehlbf3hbll0tjjiatl25d69i7, O_RDWR) failed: No such file or directory (2)

I checked the session store structure and just directories between 0 and f where there. I had to create the whole structure with all subdirectories from 0 to z.

I don't know if the session format comes form php 7.1 or from mahara, anyway the folder structure should be created accordingly to accomodate this format.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Hi Cristiano,

Mahara only supports up to PHP 7.0 at this stage.

[Robert Lyon (robertl-9)]

Hi Cristiano,

According to the PHP manual, http://php.net/manual/en/function.session-id.php

"Depending on the session handler, not all characters are allowed within the session id. For example, the file session handler only allows characters in the range a-z A-Z 0-9 , (comma) and - (minus)!"

So it sounds like we should allow more characters for the session paths.

Looking at http://php.net/manual/en/session.configuration.php#ini.session.sid-length it seems that a few new options were introduced in PHP 7.1

Currently our session bits_per_character is set to handle the option '4'

We will need to expand this so it handles option '5', and '6' as well

Cheers

Robert

[Mahara Bot (dev-mahara)]

Patch for "master" branch: https://reviews.mahara.org/7863

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

The initial report is at https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=7913&offset=0&limit=10#post32129

[Mahara Bot (dev-mahara)]

Reviewed: https://reviews.mahara.org/7863
Committed: https://git.mahara.org/mahara/mahara/commit/2d5e401bfa4ae8246252a6cef162ab7f49d280ab
Submitter: Robert Lyon (<email address hidden>)
Branch: master

commit 2d5e401bfa4ae8246252a6cef162ab7f49d280ab
Author: Robert Lyon <email address hidden>
Date: Tue Jul 11 07:42:25 2017 +1200

Bug 1670637: Updating session options for PHP 7.1

behatnotneeded

Change-Id: I589cc42dd543ea4edfa418de8b85b711d3f0dd3e
Signed-off-by: Robert Lyon <email address hidden>