PHP 5.3.13-5 on Parallels PRO CP 10.3.6

[by88]

We have been using atomic repo for upgrading PHP on several of our Centos5 servers with Parallels PRO control Panel 10.3.4/5/6 for years with no particular problems.

Two days ago we have upgraded one server with PPCP from 10.3.5 to 10.3.6 (Centos 5.8 64bit) that provides squirrelmail 1.4.22 and it does not work.
After logging in, squirrelmail refuses to continue with a common error:
"You must be logged in to access this page"

On this server we have tested all squirrelmail stable versions and the latest that works is the 1.4.9a.
No issues instead with other web applications like wp or joomla.

Please note that there aren't errors in errorlog or in maillog (the imap auth works and has been tested).
Please note that older version of squirrelmail (i.e. 1.4.9) works perfectly!

Yes I know, PPCP 10.3.6 only supports Centos 5.7 but the problem is not there.
It seems a problem related to sessions and cookies but none of the several articles/posts/kbs on the net resolve the issue.

So we have installed squirrelmail on a similar server (Centos 5.6 64bit PPCP 10.3.5) with PHP 5.3.6 from atomic repo and the result is the same.

Finally we have installed squirrelmail 1.4.22 on another similar server (Centos 5.2 32bit) with PHP 5.2.x from REMI repo and it works.
We have also installed squirrelmail 1.4.22 on a forth similar server (Centos 5 32bit) with PHP 5.2.17 from atomic repo and it doesn't work (the older squirrelmail 1.4.9a worked perfectly).

We think the problem is not the PHP version (5.2 or 5.3) but the way to manage sessions and cookies that may characterized the PHP in atomic repo.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Enzo

[scott]

perms on the sessions dir maybe?

[by88]

Hi Scott,

Sessions dir is /tmp and the sess_ files from sqmail are written correctly.

I have performed several other tests on the same environment and quirrelmail > 1.4.9a works only with PHP 5.2/5.3 by REMI repo (or default 5.1.6 by Centos5) but not with PHP 5.2/5.3 by Atomic or by jasonlitka.

Since I prefer to use you PHP distribution (already installed on other servers), is it possible to have a direct consultation from you?
(Parallels has refused to support us because they do not support environments with not official PHP packages).

Enzo

[scott]

You see they say that but the truth is we talk directly about this all the time. And yes I'd love to get to the bottom of this too. Try catching me on the #plesk irc channel on irc.freende.net.

[cepheid]

Was a direct solution to this ever figured out? Note that there is a workaround. On the Parallels Pro forum, a user posted that replacing the php_self() function in functions/strings.php in SQmail with the one from 1.4.9 worked to resolve this issue. The fact that you DON'T get this bug when using the php v5.2.x RPM from Remi suggests that it could possibly be a packaging issue or something in the php.ini file that is causing SQmail's 1.4.22 version of php_self() to fail, while the 1.4.9 version somehow escapes this problem.

If a direct solution was found (e.g. fixing something in php.ini, or repackaging the RPM somehow), please post or PM. I need to upgrade one of my Parallels Pro servers to php v5.3.x and was hoping to use the atomic RPMs for this, since others have had great luck with them (except for this SQmail issue).

Thanks!