How did my PHP session path change?

Question

EDIT - HUGE ERROR ON MY PART

I found another site that had the issue that I knew was not on the same server. Then I realized that the original site with the issue was also on a different server and had not been moved over completely yet. The server in question was actually a Plesk Parallels' server and the issue was caused by a patch applied to the server over the weekend due to a security update. This server did have the file path and I just had to chmod it to 777 instead of 77x for it to work. I apologize for the confusion and thank everyone for trying to help. +'s for all. :)

Original Post

I have a website on a shared hosting server (also mine) that since yesterday started giving me this error:

 Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: open(/var/lib/php/session/sess_678cf69f0f17b87c52136ee0280d23cc, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13) in /var/www/vhosts/domain.net/httpdocs/index.php on line 1

I've checked /usr/lib/php.ini and /usr/local/lib/php.ini to see where it is set and both say it is set to the /tmp directory, which is where it should be set and always has been. The /var/lib/php/session directory never even existed. I did create it and give it 777 permissions but that did not help. Though the bigger issue here is why did it change to begin with. There is no .htaccess file for this site and I cannot find this being set anywhere on the site itself either.

This is the ONLY site on this server with this issue, telling me its something local to the website. I just cannot figure out what. So my question is this: what should I look for to check the session save path settings for an individual site on a shared hosting environment to find out why it suddenly changed for this one client?

FYI, I am running a WHM server.

Thanks

Answer 1

I found another site that had the issue that I knew was not on the same server. Then I realized that the original site with the issue was also on a different server and had not been moved over completely yet. The server in question was actually a Plesk Parallels' server and the issue was caused by a patch applied to the server over the weekend due to a security update. This server did have the file path and I just had to chmod it to 777 instead of 77x for it to work. I apologize for the confusion and thank everyone for trying to help. +'s for all. :)

Answer 2

session_save_path(realpath(dirname($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']) . '/../tmp'));

You need to add the above code before starting the session.

Answer 3

You don't appear to have write permission to the /var directory on your server. This is a bit weird, but you can work around it. Before the call to session_start() put in a call to session_save_path() and give it the name of a directory writable by the server. More details here