pfSense

That isn't a bug in PHP code, it's failing to write files to /tmp for some reason. We've seen a few reports of this but haven't seen any common thread as to why it might be happening other than a potential issue with the disk being full or not responding in some way.

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It would be preferable to add better error handling for these kinds of PHP errors, and ideally show a more useful alert and attempt to log that to the system log if possible. I'm reopening this to fit the request given that it's closely related.

That really isn't viable. We'd have to potentially catch any/every PHP error or rewrite every call that might even possibly hit the disk and fail. Also we can't log things (at least locally) if the disk isn't responding. Even if we catch the errors, it's just a guess as to why they failed, not definite.

The functions above just happen to be two that are commonly hit, but they are far from the only ones.

Reopening this for some more investigation. There appear to be several people hitting this, but not consistently and not in a way we can reproduce in lab conditions. Enough that it may not actually be a hardware issue, but it's still possible it is a filesystem problem. If it was a drive problem I'd expect some more variation in where it fails but too many people are hitting this code path exactly.

The first error is from a failure to open /tmp/config.cache for writing. The fopen call at source:src/etc/inc/config.lib.inc#L171 is failing (returns false). Because it failed to write the config.cache, parsing the configuration fails, which triggers a notification which also fails.

The notification fails (second error, source:src/etc/inc/notices.inc#L101) because $notice_path is empty but it's not clear how that might be happening since it's defined earlier in the same file (source:src/etc/inc/notices.inc#L29).

The first error is from a file in /tmp the second in /var, though both paths do use g_get(), that doesn't seem to be related. If it was I would expect the notices to be in /notices not empty.

If it isn't a drive or FS issue, I wonder if this is related to #14031 as well then. No PHP error there but it also seems to fail to modify the notices queue on the drive somehow.

Applied in changeset c5faa351c1ef6d4555478a7f50b3a16ece7e0b2a.

Updating subject for release notes.