[pmwiki-users] Need to Enter Password Repeatedly?

Jesse Heines heines at cs.uml.edu
Thu Sep 6 20:50:41 CDT 2007


Thank you for your reply, Patrick.  What you wrote didn't solve my problem,
but it led me to the solution, which I think is very interesting and
document it here for the benefit of others.  

I report below how I fixed the problem, but I don't really understand WHY my
fix works.  I would appreciate it if someone who knows more about PHP than I
could please explain the "why" to me.

I am running on Linux.  As I suspected and as Patrick suspected as well, the
problem was with the storing of session data.  However, my php.ini file
correctly specifies session data to be stored in /tmp and /tmp is world
writable.  In addition, here are examples of the contents of two sess_*
files in my /tmp directory:

  teaching::/tmp > less sess_tj4bq7o1u0ifpa50dvmsc8rni0 
  authpw|a:1:{s:9:"{sitepassword}";i:1;}authid|N;
  teaching::/tmp > less sess_uucoq9p7vqipm0btdf77tsjlm6 
  authpw|a:1:{s:12:"{grouppassword}";i:1;}authid|N;

The problem turned out to be that my site:

  http://www.performamatics.org

which is really:

  http://teaching.cs.uml.edu/Performamatics/

was registered on GoDaddy.com with Domain Forwarding **AND MASKING
ENABLED**.  The masking prevents the domain name displayed in the address
bar from being changed.  

I don't know why masking affects the storing of session data, but it most
certainly does, at least on my system.  When I turned masking off,
everything worked fine and I only needed to enter the password once per
session.  Of course, with masking turned off, going to
http://www.performamatics.org shows a visible redirect to
http://teaching.cs.uml.edu/Performamatics/.  Although this is not horrible
and I can live with that feature, it's just not as "clean" as I would like
the site to appear.

I would really appreciate if someone could explain to me why masking affects
PHP sessions in this way.

Thank you for your help and your time.

Jesse




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