weird cookies

Anon

hey!

i am using cookies on my site. they work well BUT i noticed that if i use a computer behind a proxy or a firewall cookies wont work. i have no idea why coz cookies should be set on client machine and have nothing to do with proxy server? this is what happens:

1) behind my friend proxy server my site set a cookie but it expires just like that - before it should expire actually

2) behind a firewall in my office the cookie isnt set at all.

--------

i thougth cookies work like this: server wants sends a cookie, browser accepts it and saves it. if i set that cookie should expire at 1:50 and 1) server time is 1:48 2) client time is 4:48) --- then the cookie will expire at 4:50. how the hell does the server know the client time??? another think is that my IE says the cookie will expire at 11:19 when the time at my site is 15:17 or so? then it expires at 15:19. this is very weird... everything looks weird but works somehow.

does anyone know this in depth?

Matjaz

Anon

Cookies are set on my machine using a firewall.
Also, cookies aren't set, can't be as far as I know, to expire at a time, they are set to expire IN time, like in 1 hour, would be 3600, seconds.

Hope that helps somewhat, but I don't know why your firewall is blocking the cookies.

Anon

Weirdest cookies:

Maybe is not the firewall at all. In my own PC something went wrong with IE 5.5 and it refuses to store cookies when i use setcookie().
BUT if i use seesions it gets the PHPSESSID cookie without any problem.
To make it more fun, other sites that uses cookies but not PHP seems to have no problem to make my IE to store them (as with hotmail.com).
Other PC's on my office with IE 5.0 and IE5.5 behaves without any problem, so maybe it has to do with the way setcookie works and some obscure setup in the Win register.
(Yes, I already tryed to turn off and on cookies on my IE preferences)
If i ever get the answer to solve this, I think it will have to do with your problem so I will post it here ASAP.

Anon

ok, I worked all night with my problem. Maybe this helps you:

In IE 5.5 (an maybe since 5.1) and PHP 4.0.1pl2 setcookie() doesn't work as manual states. You should use semicolons in the expire field, i.e.:

setcookie ("TestCookie", $value,time()+3600); //doesn't work

setcookie ("TestCookie", $value,"time()+3600"); //it works

if you use a variable to determine the time offset for the cookie use:

$timeoffset=3600;
setcookie ("TestCookie", $value,"time()+$timeoffset");

At first I thought it has to do with some corrupt register on my IE installation, but reading the PHP's manual notes I realized that some other ppl has the same problem.
Maybe this fixes the weird proxy cookies one.

Anon

Hi, Alejandro

Yes! Thank you by your work. This simple trick solves problems with cookies and all versions of IE (maybe another monopolic trick of M$?!), at least works fine for me. I see this problem in my intranet, but not when the same web site is in the web server in Internet (I use Apache as my web server).