phpmyadmin authentication timeout

I'm just an occasional user of phpmyadmin, but some colleagues who heavily works on databases told me that they were really annoyed by the fact that after a quite short amount of time they needed to authenticate again.

The problem is that the cookie authentication set the lifetime of the cookie itself to 1800 seconds (30 minutes); after 30 minutes you need to login again.

If you like to change this behavior, edit the file /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php and add the following line:

$cfg['LoginCookieValidity'] = 18000;

this will set the lifetime of the cookie to 5 hours (18000 seconds).

Note: this solution came from

http://www.dotticontra.org/blog/post/phpmyadmin_authentication_timeout.html

Its working fine with my phpmyadmin.