Ran into an issue because I wanted to work on my computer while a system update was going on. I had the browser open and was making database changes in my LAMP environment.

I was using phpMyAdmin to create a new table. I did that and closed the browser (without logging off) and rebooted after the kernel update.

Then logged back into phpMyAdmin to make more changes. The signin page came up fine. I entered my credentials and I was greeted by the following error:

phpMyAdmin – Error

Cannot start session without errors, please check errors given in your PHP and/or webserver log file and configure your PHP installation properly.

phpMyAdmin - Error

A quick search and I found an article that gave me the clue I needed:

As Root:

root@jdrummond-laptop:~# cd /var/lib/php5
root@jdrummond-laptop:/var/lib/php5# ls -l
total 40
-rw------- 1 www-data www-data 37673 2010-09-11 08:25 sess_f3pq4jcastnul23laj48ot92684u414p
root@jdrummond-laptop:/var/lib/php5# rm sess_f3pq4jcastnul23laj48ot92684u414p


Looks like a session got stranded in the folder and had some bogus data in it.

To fix this I removed the old session file and then phpMyAdmin was able to make new session files with no problem.

Here’s what the directory looked like after I got rid of the session that was blocking my login, and was in fact logged in.

root@jdrummond-laptop:/var/lib/php5# ls -l
total 76
-rw------- 1 www-data www-data 17305 2010-09-11 08:31 sess_5jc4klqbfsp5r53s7410n61o64dchjot
-rw------- 1 www-data www-data 34934 2010-09-11 08:31 sess_f3pq4jcastnul23laj48ot92684u414p
-rw------- 1 www-data www-data 17305 2010-09-11 08:31 sess_tgfla0dqoj33m2mrqvm08r7t3npvhhsh


If I hadn’t had files open during the update, I could have saved some headaches. Moral of the story is. Close all programs before updating your Ubuntu system.

References:
http://www.electrictoolbox.com/phpmyadmin-cannot-start-session-without-errors/