IE 7 forgetting session variables - sometimes

bunner_bob

I'm working on a site in which most people don't have this problem, but the client has it on all three of his PCs.

When he attempts to log into the site's admin section, he is able to enter his user Id and password and log in fine. This action sets session variables with his user id, name, etc. As soon as he switches to another page, the system thinks he isn't logged in and tells him so. This only happens for him in IE 7. Firefox is fine. And it works fine for me in Firefox and all versions of IE (and on the Mac). And it works fine for a consultant I checked with in IE 7. And the vast majority of the site's customers (they use a public login, not the admin login, but the functionality is the same. And, my client has the same problems with the public login).

I did a print_r() on $SESSION, and when he logs in all the required variables show up in the session, but as soon as he attempts to reload the page or go to another page in the admin, $SESSION shows up as empty.

He has cookies enabled, and enabled cookies specifically for this site via the Privacy Policy item under Page.

I'm getting to the point where I'd like to hire someone to help me troubleshoot this, but I'm not sure even that is going to work.

Anybody have any ideas why this is happening?

NogDog

What is the config value of session.cookie_domain? If not so already, you might want to set it to ".yourdomain.com" (note the leading period), so that you aren't affected by whether or not the user (or links/redirects in your pages) specify a "www" subdomain or just the domain.

bunner_bob

It's "no value" presently.

I'll have to set that via htaccess, probably. Would the syntax be:
php_value session.cookie_domain .yourdomain.com
? I think that's right but if you can confirm...?

On this site, virtually everything is done as an absolute URL, so the www is always present. So I'm betting that isn't it. But I'll try anything 🙂

NogDog

Looks good to me. Not sure if the value needs to be quoted or not. (Try echoing an ini_get() of it to see if it took.)

bunner_bob

Huh- well that's a trip. I tried what I entered above, and now I'M getting kicked off when I try to refresh the page, or switch to another page. In other words, adding the above line to htaccess causes what happens only to my client to happen to me too.

Now why would that be? Maybe the domain isn't the domain...? (checked what was set via phpinfo() and it was correct)

I commented out the added line and everything's back to normal.

I think you're on to something here....

bunner_bob

...but I don't know what else to try?

Anybody...?