After putting my Moodle 2.4 instance into maintenance mode in prep to upgrade to 2.5, I upgraded to PHP 5.4.17 from PHP 5.3 and now I cannot authenticate to Moodle at all with any user name, admin or otherwise. The login screen just bombs out and does not go anywhere. The error that I keep getting in the apache log is...
PHP Warning: session_write_close(): Failed to write session data (user). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/var/lib/php5) in /usr/local/www/htdocs/lib/sessionlib.php on line 260, referer: https://<<servername>>/login/index.php
I have read this doc http://docs.moodle.org/23/en/Errors_FAQ about this error and I have read the entire forum post that it references https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=55925#254596 and have tried everything that they suggest.
I have checked disk space usage, I have checked folder permissions and ownership a dozen times, changed folders several times while verifying permissions, changed to using $CFG->dbsessions, and still nothing allows the session to save to disk and let me in.
I thought perhaps that Moodle is not compatible with PHP 5.4 even though it says it would be with PHP 5.3+. If somebody can verify that then I am ready to revert back to 5.3 if necessary.
Any thoughts or direction would be greatly appreciated.
PHP Warning: session_write_close(): Failed to write session data (user). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/var/lib/php5) in /usr/local/www/htdocs/lib/sessionlib.php on line 260, referer: https://moodle-beta.cedarville.edu/login/index.php