session and cookie expiration

[dr4296]

Greetings All!

I'm working with some open source software.

Apparently, for user management, it creates a cookie containing the php session id for the user... and then creates the appropriate session file on the back-end in the /tmp directory.

Now, some of my users are complaining that their sessions are timing out after 20 minutes. So, I'm trying to investigate.

I THINK the cookie's actually being set to a timeout of "0".... but the code to create the cookie seems to be set to more than this:

if (isset($GET["SetUserIDCookie"])) {
setcookie("UserID",$GET["SetUserIDCookie"],time()+7200);
}

As far as the session goes, the php.ini file is set to a default timeout of 180 minutes.

How can I PROVE what the session expiration time is going to be? How can I print what the server "thinks" the sessions expire time is?

Thanks!

-= Dave =-

[weekender]

to show at what time the session will expire...

echo date("F j, Y, g:i a", time()+7200);

i suspect the server time and the client time are not the same. If the server is set to expire sessions after 180 mins and they are actually going after 20 mins, i'm guessing the server time is 160 mins behind the client time.

ie server thinks it is 6pm, sets session to expire at 7:30pm
client thinks it is 7:10pm, expires the cookie at 7:30, which is 6:20 on the server.

[dr4296]

Thanks for the reply.

What effect would time-zone have on this?

I'm thinking the server is set to GMT and the users are in the Central US Time Zone.

Thanks!

-= Dave =-