oddities - hopefully just yahoo php

sdbland

Recently we did a fair bit of PHP development where the bulk of the work was done on a build of PHP, version 4.3.4, under Mac OSX and Win XP.

When this was moved to Yahoo, v 4.3.6, we began to see a number of issues, most of which seem to be around $SESSION. For example the local servers seemed to maintain everything correctly, which at Yahoo we saw an interesting oddity. If a named value was used and read from say $GET, it destroyed that value in $SESSION. In a specific example a value 'sessionID' was used in $SESSION to track the session back to the database. Get when a get was done with a matching parm name - it cleared that value from $_SESSION. This only happened at Yahoo and not on the local dev machines.

In the second case, when a link left the application on the PHP server at Yahoo, went to another site, then returned, on some browsers the session data from Yahoo was lost, but not all the time and not on all browsers. Again, this never happened on the dev machines. This one is perhaps explainable by some session switching that may be happening at Yahoo between servers - but would still be scary.

The Yahoo PHP sever seems to be a special Yahoo build. The question is has anyone come across anything like this?

Works on these servers, same code does not work on these servers, and it does not appear to be server config/options.

tsinka

Hi,

create a phpinfo() script and execute it on the servers. Are there any differences in the register_globals and/or session settings ?

I don't know the setup of the servers on yahoo, but if they have a server farm for redundancy reasons the problem might be that session data gets lost between servers or something like that.

Thomas

sdbland

The settings are the same between the two with some minor differnces. One is using Apache as the web server etc.

For the second item, losing all session data might make sense for a server farm that was incorrectly moving sessions between machines. But thet would not explain the first oddity, where one value was over written and all the others preseved. Server farm would not do that.

tsinka

Please post the code that shows that odd behaviour on the yahoo server(s) so I can get an idea of how it looks like.

Thomas

sdbland

Not easily, I would have to put together a set of files - and then to test would require you have access to a Yahoo php account

tsinka

If register_globals is set to on then such odd problems can occur if the variable names inside the script have the same name as the variable in the session like

$_SESSION['var'] = "something";
$var = $_GET['another'];

That would overwrite the value in the session. But I assume that yahoo has set register_globals to off so the problem must be somewhere else.

Create a little script that just contains code to reproduce the problem. Does that script show the same odd behaviour ?

Thomas