CMS Made Simple Forums

I'm trying to install CMS 0.7 on a Debian computer. I unpacked the tarball into /var/www/cms (DocumentRoot being /var/www) and followed the instructions in the INSTALL file. I can run the first stage of the install, and it reports everything as successful. The second stage fails with this error:

Fatal error: session_start(): Failed to initialize storage module. in /var/www/cms/include.php on line 32

I have tried this both with a modified config.php (taken from the sample config, and adapted to my own settings) and the one autogenerated by cmsmadesimple when it is first run. The error is the same.

The permissions on the various files all seem to be OK, and I can log into mysql with the specified username and password. phpMyAdmin works fine, and I had a functioning drupal install yesterday, so I don't think it's a problem within PHP.

Here's my system's stats:

Linux ragabash 2.4.24 #9 Sat Apr 3 23:34:04 EST 2004 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux
Apache 1.3.31
PHP 4.3.3RC3

(Most things are installed from debs, but cmsmadesimple is just untarred.)

I do note that, although the 404 page on my server reports apache 1.3.31, the "apache" section of phpinfo() mentions 1.3.27. I don't know if that is relevant or not.

Does anyone have any idea of what the problem is or how to fix this?

I'm having a hard time tracking this one down. It's a common error, but I can't seem to track down a fix.

Basically, it looks like session files aren't being saved properly...

What settings are in your php.ini related to sessions? Make sure the directory (probably /tmp) has 777 permissions. Make sure session.save_handler is set to 'files'.

Also, check out: http://lightphpcms.sourceforge.net/cms. ... /number.2/

Everyone seems to have problems with this bug, but to be honest, it's the first I've heard of it.

Let us know how it turns out.

Thanks!

I managed to get it going. I'm not quite sure what the problem was, as I don't think I did anything different. Here's the last few steps I did:

1. Changed session.save_handler back to files in php.ini (I'd changed it back and forth a few times)
2. Restart apache

I verified that /tmp was world-readable, I tried creating a .htaccess file in the /var/www/cms directory with the options suggested on the page you referred to, and I'm fairly sure that I did have save_handler = files from when drupal was installed. But it wasn't until I changed it again and restarted apache (again) that it worked.

Oh well. I'm going to take the "I don't quite know what I did or why it was broke, but now it works so I won't touch it again" approach.

Thanks for the help!