I keep getting this timeout error from phpmyadmin: " No activity within 1440 seconds; please log in again". @#%@#$@$@ So I decided to change that setting. Open up your config.inc.php file and add the following line: (If you don’t have config.inc.php, copy from config.sample.inc.php)
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['LoginCookieValidity'] = 60 * 60 * 12;
The above setting sets the timeout value to 12 hours in phpMyAdmin.
If your server crashed and cannot load your phpmyadmin page, check your apache log at /var/log/apache2/error.log. If you got PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function get() on a non-object in /path/to/phpmyadmin/libraries/Header.class.php on line 135, then do a chmod 644 config.inc.php. that should take care of the error.
You will then get another warning: " Your PHP parameter session.gc_maxlifetime is lower that cookie validity configured in phpMyAdmin, because of this, your login will expire sooner than configured in phpMyAdmin.". That makes sense because php’s session will time out first anyways. So we will need to change /etc/php.ini .
session.gc_maxlifetime = 43200
That’s 12 hours in seconds. Restart your apache server and you are done!