Session variables lost after first login

unlucky17

So, I've built a few sites with pretty generic login systems. It queries the database looking for the appropriate username, password and permission levels, then if it works, it assigns the information passed from POST into a SESSION variable or two.

But, if I go to a page that the browser has seen recently, it loses the SESSION variables and I have to log in again. But, upon the 2nd login, it works fine from that point on.

I thought it was an issue with caching pages so I put a script in to force it to look for new information every time a page is loaded, but that didn't help.

The very first thing that's written on any page that loads on these sites is session_start();.. so I don't think it's any sort of glitch or information loaded out of order. It just loses the data after the first login if I immediately go to a recently-seen page, then works from the 2nd login and never loses the information unless it expires.

I also tried to double it over with Cookies, creating cookies upon login and then reading the session information from a cookie from then on, but it does the same thing, even though the cookie exists and can be called properly.

Any ideas what might be wrong? Anybody ever encountered this?

djjjozsi

without a code we just quess what is the problem.
if you logged in succesfully, redirect the site to a welcome page header("Location: somewhere.php");

Make sure your program isn't generating output before the session_start(),
its a common problem if you saved the file AS UTF8( with BOM-

unlucky17

I use includes on my pages and the first file I include is meta.php, which has all meta data for the site on it. The first line on that page is session_start(); Do you think it's due to the include? Should I put session_start() as the first bit of information on every page?

There's not really much code to show the problem. The site I'm doing now is an admin-protected area so it checks to see if $_SESSION['username'] exists at all. If it doesn't, then it prompts for a login. I'll log in. It'll forward to a success page and a re-direct to the last visited page. If after that point I visit a page that I wasn't previously logged in on, it'll forget the variable and won't show me as logged in, asking for login information. I'll log in again, then no problems.

djjjozsi

meta.php is for the user and the browser.

You need to use header('Location: success.php'); to redirect the user on a success login.

I think, meta.php and its output causes this problem.

session_start() should be the first command.