postfixadmin stopped working after upgrade - strange php errors. Help please!

[jrcdec]

I have a fairly mature Postfix server which has been running postfixadmin since 2010. After a recent update, postifxadmin has stopped working as shown by the two attached screenshots.
The server runs normally for existing mail accounts, but I am unable to add new ones or manage the existing ones. I don't know if this happened with the latest update or the one before that because our user list had been stable for the last 3 years and I only found out when suddenly trying to add more users.
The first error about not using https: is false - the screenshot is the result of accessing the setup screen over https,
I have tried addressing the second error about the changed password format by entering the new format password hash in config.local.php but it had no effect - the same error comes up in the postfixadmin setup screen.
Any suggestions for what to try next will be more than welcome - I suspect the slew of php errors in the postfixadmin setup screen might look familiar to someone and suggest what the culprit new setting or permission might be.
The system is running Ubuntu 22.04 jammy on kernel 5.15.0-91,php 8.1.2, postfix, dovecot, and mysql, with spamassassin as the spam filter and all packages on the latest version in the ubuntu stable release. postfixadmin should therefore be 3.3.10-2 but I can't tell for sure as I can't get to the login screen to see it

Many thanks in advance

James
(reposting from sourceforge earlier today since I just learned postfixadmin questions now live here)

[DavidGoodwin]

I think you're using a pretty old variant of PostfixAdmin, and your PHP runtime has changed to be somewhat newer.

You can find out your PostfixAdmin version by looking in config.inc.php for something like: $CONF['version'] = ..... Alternatively, if you've installed through your distribution's package tool - dpkg -l postfixadmin

You can either try and update the postfixadmin code, or try and change the PHP config. Changing PHP's config is probably easiest. If you are using PHP 8.1 with an old version of PostfixAdmin you'll probably encounter other problems.

1. Update PostfixAdmin outside of the distribution's package by downloading the latest 3.3 tar file from https://github.com/postfixadmin/postfixadmin/releases .... you'll probably need to update your apache config file as well as accessing 'setup.php' in your browser to apply db updates. You're likely to get some confusion over which config file is in use / which source code is being run, so this is probably a more difficult fix.

2. Update PHP's settings to cope with your legacy Postfixadmin install - create a file within the web root named something like 'phpinfo.php' containing '<?php phpinfo();' and access it through your browser; it will confirm the version of PHP you think you're using and also show the setting for the short_open_tags parameter. Then, edit /etc/php//apache2/php.ini and add a line on the bottom for 'short_open_tags = On' ( I think the version of Postfixadmin you're trying to use is too old, and hasn't had various short open tag fixes ). This might be the easier fix?

3. Downgrade PHP to PHP 7.4 ... this might fix it? Depends on the server config though.

[jrcdec]

[jrcdec]

Since I am only using mysql I presume I can safely ignore the postgresql and SQLite warnings?

[DavidGoodwin]

phew, sometimes the obvious solutions aren't so obvious :)

Yes you can ignore the postgresql/sqlite things - they're just notices really.

[jrcdec]

Many thanks again! I strongly suspected it had to be a php problem from the spurious php leaking onto the webpage, but i did not think of something as simple as a2enmod having been overlooked by the package update from 7.4 to 8.1.
It took you to spot it.
Separately, I have seen some chat on the issue of all the noise coming out of some deprecated php functions complaining when fed null arguments. Are you planning to replace those at some point? I suspect our current workaround of dialing down the log noise level in php.ini will stop working at some point in the future...

[DavidGoodwin]

I'm not aware of any - if you can give me the error message(s) and what version of PostfixAdmin you're using, I can fix them easily enough.