at the time I did try custom template of the ibay settings, will look at this again outside busy hours and try a bit harder. The issue was found when server was upgraded from sme9 to sme10.
The web developers advice was; Drupal requires session.save_handler set as 'user'.
Drupal can work with globally setting session.save_handler to files, as it alters some settings per its needs on run.
But here, as it is set as admin_value, the PHP interpreter considers it a hard bound setting and doesn't allow altering on run.
websites are to be updated so things might change. They also said the following;
Right now we are running Drupal on PHP 5.5 and working on some improvements on sites. We will switch to PHP 7.4 while upgrading Drupal, once done with the urgent improvements being done to make the existing sites work as needed.
Right now we aren't using any PHP 7.4 versions, so we can keep its session.save_handler setting as 'files' to keep low server load.
It was the pending update for nextcloud24+ to php81 made me think to mention this. I can apply the same mod to php81 and they can use php74 =user