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Redux: PHP5 cronjob in Debian packages

After running into “session could not be started because it was already started with session_start() or session.auto_start” on a project, I realized that removing the cronjob is not the only thing that needs to happen to let PHP manage it’s own sessions.

  • chmod www-data:www-data /var/lib/php5
  • update /etc/php5/apache2/php5.ini and set
    session.gc_probability = 1

I’m assuming that this more paranoid than usual security measure was a way to help inexperienced admins and developers to help prevent session hijacking should the web server be breached. However, if root is gained, it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not going to say that I am an expert in security for servers, but I can tell you that Debian, and therefore Ubuntu, are the only ones doing this type of paranoid security practice. Coming from the FreeBSD world, you are responsible for the security of your machine, not the developers or port maintainers.

</rant>

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