Installing a current version of phyMyAdmin on Centos 6 turned out to be a grand pain. First, it turns out there are two packages in the rpmforge repo, “phymyadmin” and “phpMyAdmin”, resulting in installations of version 2 and 3, respectively.
Once past that, phpMyAdmin reports “Cannot load mcrypt extension. Please check your PHP configuration“. Well, that should be easy to fix. Just a quick “yum install php-mcrypt”. Nope. After digging around for a while, installing, uninstalling, rebooting, etc, I checked the the file /etc/php.d/mcrypt.ini.
Its contents were
; Enable mcrypt extension module extension=module.so
This is incorrect. I changed it to
; Enable mcrypt extension module extension=mcrypt.so
then restarted httpd and the problem went away. It appears that the php-mcrypt rpm, at least as of php-mcrypt-5.3.3-1.el6.rf.i686, incorrectly creates the mcrypt.ini file.