Last night I had migrated one our client accounts from old cpanel server to new cpanel server , customers reported their phpMyAdmin install was showing the error message “Cannot start session without errors” and they were unable to even get to the phpMyAdmin login page on the new server.
This post looks at what caused the issue and how to fix it.
Clearly there’s something wrong with the way phpmyadmin sessions are being used. Cpanel work with is own internal PHP and store the application session files in different folder for security reason.
On Cpanel server, every application as his own php configuration setting like phpmyadmin , php configuration file is /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/etc/phpmyadmin/php.ini , roundcube (/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/etc/roundcube/php.ini)
PHPmyAdmin session files are store in /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanelphpmyadmin/ folder. The /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanelphpmyadmin/ folder ownership should be cpanelphpmyadmin.cpanelphpmyadminn /var/cpanel/userhomes/cpanelphpmyadmin/ in order to get phpmyadmin work perfect.
root@server [/var/cpanel/userhomes]# chown cpanelphpmyadmin.cpanelphpmyadmin cpanelphpmyadmin/ -R
If session folder owned by any other username rather than cpanelphpmyadmin then you will get “Cannot start session without errors, please check errors given in your PHP and/or webserver log file and configure your PHP installation properly” error.
root@server [/var/cpanel/userhomes]# ll
drwxr-xr-x 4 cpanel cpanel 4096 Dec 11 23:04 cpanel/
drwx--x--x 4 cpanelhorde cpanelhorde 4096 Sep 24 2009 cpanelhorde/
drwx--x--x 4 cpanelphpmyadmin cpanelphpmyadmin 4096 Sep 24 2009 cpanelphpmyadmin/
drwx--x--x 4 cpanelphppgadmin cpanelphppgadmin 4096 Sep 24 2009 cpanelphppgadmin/
drwx--x--x 4 cpanelroundcube cpanelroundcube 4096 Sep 24 2009 cpanelroundcube/
root@server [/var/cpanel/userhomes]#
Regards
Alex P
