Install fails - /var/lib/php/session not valid :-(

[rogerwalker]

I did a search first, of "Not A Valid Directory" and "Writable Session Save Path"
and even "/var/lib/php/session" but none of them turned up anything.

I'm at a loss with this bit of PHP code, which is part of the
install (and is preventing me from installing!):

<tr>
<td><b>Writable Session Save Path (<?php echo $session_save_path; ?>)</b></td>
<td align="right"><?php
if(is_dir($session_save_path))
{
[...code removed...]
}
else
{
echo '<b><span class=stop>Not A Valid Directory</font></b>';
$error_found = true;
}
?></td>
</tr>

Looks fairly straight forward - test the $session_save_path (which
is "/var/lib/php/session", from /etc/php.ini) to make sure it exists
(with is_dir) or reports "Not A Valid Directory".

Well, the directory DOES exist, and I even made sure that the
permissions were 777 from top to bottom, yet it always gets reported as
"Not A Valid Directory".

I do not know PHP. Anyone know what might be happening here? How
to fix things?

Everything else reports okay on my dual opteron FC3 system.

Thanks.

[rogerwalker]

My best guess is that because I am limiting PHP to operate within its own directory only, attempts to access the session directory directly, which is outside of the document root, will always fail. I'm editing the install code to let me through this test, since it does exist and is writable.

[dgoglio]

I think I solved the problem... at least for myself! The first thing I did to try to fix the problem was change the permissions to 777 for the /var/lib/php/session dir, this did not work. I then added a '/' at the end of the directory string in my php.ini file... this also did not work. Finally I changed the session.save_path to '/tmp' from '/var/lib/php/session' and this solved the problem.

[reachrenel]

I think I solved the problem... at least for myself! The first thing I did to try to fix the problem was change the permissions to 777 for the /var/lib/php/session dir, this did not work. I then added a '/' at the end of the directory string in my php.ini file... this also did not work. Finally I changed the session.save_path to '/tmp' from '/var/lib/php/session' and this solved the problem.

Can you please help a newbie? Can you give a me step by step on this: "Finally I changed the session.save_path to '/tmp' from '/var/lib/php/session' and this solved the problem."? I mean what did you change?

Thanks

[ruchida]

That is the "session.save_path" variable in php.ini.

[reachrenel]

Thank you. I resolved it by going to my httpd.include file via root login and edited the the file to include the path /var/libp/php and it worked. I like this software so far.