Upgrading IPB and running into 4S109/5? A Possible Solution

[Phillyman]

So I have been busy for a bit and still running IPB 4.4.10, decided to carve out some time to spin up a test site and see if I would run into any issues with upgrading to IPB 4.6.2. Since I dont have enough space on my webhost to duplicate my site, I spun up a $9 webhosting account at Dreamhost. Which for those that have used Dreamhost, know that they don't run CPANEL.

I made a copy of my site over at Dreamhost, and when I went to do the upgrade I got the following message....

 

We were unable to start a PHP session. You will need to contact your host to adjust your PHP configuration before you can continue. The error reported was: session_start(): Failed to read session data: files (path: /var/cpanel/php/sessions/ea-php72)

 

So long story short, a long time ago I had an issue with uploading large gallery images, and the fix was to set a PHP.INI file in the root of my website. I went ahead and removed that and tried again to upgrade. To my surprise the same damn error! Then I see a USER.INI in the root of my website with the same information that was in PHP.INI. Again I remove the file and start the upgrade process again......and it throws the same error AGAIN! So then I find the same info from PHP.INI and USER.INI in the dang .HTACCESS file. Once I removed the two INI files and removed the following lines from my HTACCESS file, it finally completed the upgrade.

Figure I would save anyone else the hair loss by posting my situation.

These were the lines in the .HTACCESS

# BEGIN cPanel-generated php ini directives, do not edit
# Manual editing of this file may result in unexpected behavior.
# To make changes to this file, use the cPanel MultiPHP INI Editor (Home >> Software >> MultiPHP INI Editor)
# For more information, read our documentation (https://go.cpanel.net/EA4ModifyINI)
<IfModule php7_module>
   php_flag display_errors Off
   php_value max_execution_time 30
   php_value max_input_time 60
   php_value max_input_vars 1000
   php_value memory_limit 256M
   php_value post_max_size 128M
   php_value session.gc_maxlifetime 1440
   php_value session.save_path "/var/cpanel/php/sessions/ea-php72"
   php_value upload_max_filesize 128M
   php_flag zlib.output_compression Off
</IfModule>

 

[Lucas James]

On 6/25/2021 at 11:39 PM, Phillyman said:

We were unable to start a PHP session. You will need to contact your host to adjust your PHP configuration before you can continue. The error reported was: session_start(): Failed to read session data: files (path: /var/cpanel/php/sessions/ea-php72)

The culprit here is the following parameter; in your .htaccess, php.ini and user.ini files:

session.save_path

Change this:

session.save_path = "/var/cpanel/php/sessions/ea-php72"

To this:

session.save_path = "/tmp"

Save the files. Refresh the IPS upgrade error page and you're good to go.

This applies to PHP version 7.0 or 7.1 and so on...

[Prank]

Really appreciate this. Thanks.