Forum OpenACS Q&A: subsite cookie error on 3.2.5

Posted by David Kuczek on 08/27/02 08:40 PM

I recently encountered a weird behaviour on my subsite, which is still
in test mode:

I have one main site foo.com and a subsite sub.foo.com. I don't have
any problems logging into foo.com using Netscape, Mozilla or IE.

But sometimes I have a problem logging into sub.foo.com via IE. A user
gets redirected to bad-password.tcl whenever he enters a bad password,
but doesn't get logged in when he enters the correct password. This is
happening within /register/user-login-2.tcl. I suppose that
ad_user_login could be the culprit... This *always* happens to my IE
(older version) at work and *sometimes* to my IE 6.0 at home.

Did anyone already stumble over this problem?

2: Response to subsite cookie error on 3.2.5 (response to 1)

Posted by Janine Ohmer on 08/27/02 08:47 PM

We have a 3.2.5 site which is for registered users only, and we occasionally run into a user who just cannot get logged in. Usually we can trace it to a browser problem (Netscape 6.1 has bad mojo and must be upgraded at once). But there is the occasional user where we just cannot figure it out.

I think it has always been IE where we have had to give up and say "use someone else's computer", but I put that down to these being mostly corporate users more than it being an IE specific problem. It happened once with someone using Lotus, too. *shudder*

3: Response to subsite cookie error on 3.2.5 (response to 1)

Posted by David Kuczek on 08/28/02 02:06 PM

I have more news on this strange behavior...

I killed all the cookies from yesterday out of the IE folder "Temporary Internet Files" and it worked with foo.com and sub.foo.com!!! I logged in the same user on both sites as well as different users on both sites and I couldn't recreate the error. After couple hours I retried to log in.... and the same error as before occurs: I just can't log into sub.foo.com but I can log into foo.com!!!! STRANGE...

Then I logged out of both sites and evaluated the cookies. They are different.

for sub.foo.com:

ad_user_login
3,726F796264404066
sub.foo.com/
0
3190974464
30050941
3018160352
29511313
*

AND

for foo.com:

ad_browser_id
204535
foo.com/
0
3190974464
30050941
2358065712
29511278
*
ad_last_visit
1030535689
arasis.de/
0
3190974464
30050941
2053370352
29511313
*

This means that he didn't really log out with sub.foo.com and doesn't have a browser_id anymore. After I just typed in sub.foo.com/register/logout.tcl the sub.foo.com cookie looks like this:

ad_last_visit
1030536486
sub.foo.com/
0
3190974464
30050941
1429595760
29511315
*

The browser_id is still missing and I can't log into sub.foo.com at all!

Then I delete the cookies again and the old error occurs. STRANGE!

Then I close IE completely AND delete the cookies. I *can* log into sub.foo.com, great, but what's wrong? I am going crazy...

Any cookie chief out there?

4: Response to subsite cookie error on 3.2.5 (response to 1)

Posted by David Kuczek on 08/28/02 07:12 PM

I am getting there slowly. I isolated the error being a frame problem. I have my subsite integrated into somebody elses main-frame (I told him this was a sh**** idea, but he wouldn't listen) and the login and logout process works fine when you do it directly via sub.foo.com, but fails when you do it through the frame! This only happens to IE.

With fails when you do it through a frame I mean the cookie is not even written to the "/Temporaray Internet Files" folder of IE.

Any suggestions how to fix this?

5: Response to subsite cookie error on 3.2.5 (response to 1)

Posted by David Kuczek on 08/31/02 04:09 PM

For the record:

Obviously IE only accepts cookies from within a frame when the domain of the frame is the same as the domain that is displayed in the browser.

I therefore moved the frameset to my server and referenced the top and left navigation to the external server and not vice versa.