About passwords and setting session

[Anon]

Hi,

I would like to know how do the commercial websites keep track of their customers or patrons. I know every time a a user logs in the script generates a random identification number and that number is updated to the database against the user id. I dont know the syntax in PHP to do it. Is there any random string or number generator function in PHP?? How do you use this function?? Im using MySQL database to store the user information.

Thanks for your help.

Jason

[yelvington]

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_usertrack.html