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

If you came here because your cron is throwing errors every 30 Minutes (at 09 and 39) you may have simmilar errors in your syslog and/or mailbox:

[ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) -print0 | xargs -n 200 -r -0 rm
PHP Fatal error: Directive 'allow_call_time_pass_reference' is no longer available in PHP in Unknown on line 0

The reason for this maybe that you upgraded your Debian to Wheezy and you have old entrys in your /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini.

I had to comment out the following lines and the errors vanished.

• allow_call_time_pass_reference
• register_long_arrays

Im writing this because this is one of the top google results if you search for the error-messages and it may affect many users/admins who maintained thier debian-installations for more than one release.

PS: This helped me very much: http://vernontbludgeon.com/blog/archives/2013/10/debian-php-session-garbage-collection-maxlifetime-fails-when-php.ini-has-obsolete-directives.html