I’ve just upgraded a few of my VMs to OpenBSD 5.9 from 5.8. For the most part the migration went very smoothly, and I was able to run it over a very slow satellite link with an actual downtime per VM not exceeding 10-15 minutes, by which time all services were back up and running. Pretty slick! One thing I did struggle with though was the Roundcube Webmail client.

Description of an issue with Roundcube

Following the Core OS upgrade (I chose the bsd.rd route and then used the (U)pgrade option), I ran sysmerge, removed the no longer required files and did the pkg_add -u (for a more detailed description of the upgrade process, please follow the excellent excellent OpenBSD Upgrade documentation). After the upgrade above, I’ve deployed the required patches as per OpenBSD 5.9 Errata and my server was back up and running, with all services up.

One issue I did notice was that I could no longer use the Roundcube Webmail.

When I opened the webmail page, I was greeted with the following error message in my browser:

ERROR: Wrong 'suhosin.session.encrypt' option value and it wasn't possible to set it to required value (). Check your PHP configuration (including php_admin_flag).

I was under the impression that as of a few versions of OpenBSD ago, Suhosin was no longer being released as part of the PHP suite as it wasn’t maintained anymore, so this baffled me for a while.

After a short-ish investigation last night, which basically turned nothing, I’ve disabled Roundcube completely for the night with a static HTML page containing a suitable information and went to bed.

The Fix

This morning I woke up fresh, and decided to look for a solution a bit more, as I genuinely don’t like for things to stop working as a result of any work I’ve done.

It turned out the fix was rather simple.

In the /etc/php-5.6.ini, I just added the following section at the end of the file:

[suhosin]
suhosin.session.encrypt = 0

followed by issuing:

arctic:~$ doas rcctl restart php56_fpm

and everything is back up and running!