Debian based systems Session killed at 30 minutes in special cron, how to override?

Question

Have been pulling out my hair trying to find out why my sessions are being terminated/killed/destroyed at 30 minutes. Well it looks like Debian based systems have a special

Answer 1

This is a question for serverfault.com.

However, change session.gc_maxlifetime in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini or - if you don't have an apache2 one - one of the other /etc/php5/*/php.ini files. The script /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime will then use the maximum for that setting found in any of those files.

Editing maxlifetime won't help or at least only until the php5-common package is updated again.