Frustration this evening updating my TurnKey Linux LAMP appliance. Couldn’t get phpMyAdmin to load after update. Server error. Couldn’t track the darn thing down.
After a step by step “echo ‘here i am’” campaign, it came down to this: in /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php, it was trying to “Load autoconf local config” from /var/lib/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php. Problem was /var/lib/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php was set to no read permission! Probably a result of some failed upgrade or something. I just don’t have time for this right now! Arg!
Anyway, chmod a+r (sudo or as root, etc) on /var/lib/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php did the trick.
UPDATE 2012-Aug-9: Doing some maintenance work on yet another virtual appliance, and not only was config.inc.php thus afflicted, so was blowfish_secret.inc.php. The above command plus this command fixed it:
sudo chmod a+r /var/lib/phpmyadmin/blowfish_secret.inc.php
Now, back to work.