Sessions and IIS 5? Oh dear Lord shoot me.

RadioGeek

Here is my situation involving "login2.php" and "index.php".

I have a script, login2.php, which processes a log in and then assigns session variables. If you log in successfully, it sets a session variable.

So login2.php sets the variables correctly as evidenced by a quick:

print_r($_SESSION);

I can see the variable sitting there in the array. The problem is, when the user uses the menu on that page (of successful login) to go to the main page (or any page really) ... suddenly the $_SESSION array is empty. (Yes, I used the session_start() on all pages.)

So in "index.php":

print_r($_SESSION);

returns an empty array.

What the hell is going on here? They are there one minute, and the second you navigate away from a page, they are gone. Dear Lord.

Here are the meaningful segments.

login2.php:

session_start();
...
$_SESSION["ML_LoggedIn"] = "TRUE";
...
print_r($_SESSION);

index.php:

session_start();
...
if ($_SESSION["ML_LoggedIn"] != "") {
    print("Logged in.");
} else {
    print("NOT logged in.");
}
...
print_r($_SESSION);

As I mentioned, index.php always returns "NOT logged in" and an empty array set for $_SESSION.

Can anyone help me? I'm about to lose it here!

I know about the header("Location...") bug, and since I'm not using that, that isn't the problem 🙂

Weedpacket

Possibility: the browser has cookies (even session cookies) turned off, so it's not storing the session id there, and the server's php.ini has enable_trans_sid turned off, so it's not putting the session ID in the URLs. With both of those turned off you have either turn one of them back on, or put the session ID into the pages (probably using SID in the URLs) yourself.

One test is to see what session_id() returns on the two pages: if they're different then the session itself is not being retained by the browser and the previous paragraph holds. If they're the same then the session data isn't getting retained by the server for some reason - check the session files that are generated and see what's in them.