Gallery login problem...

[Rick]

Anyone else noticed that gallery logins don't seem to survive from one album to another?
Anyone know exactly how long ago it stopped working?
I'm puzzled because it all works fine on the test copies I have on my home system.

[Ian]

can't help I'm afraid.

Are you trying to fix it before the migration? It might be as well to freeze the gallery for the next couple of weeks and build a fresh database ready for the move?

[Rick]

Mainly I want to determine that it's not just me seeing this. It seems to be a PowWeb-specific problem, so I'm inclined to leave it til after the migration and tackle it then, unless there are pressing reasons to go try fix it sooner. RobertM uploaded an AVI which should (I presume) have gone in one of the members-only raw data galleries, and fixing that may fall under "pressing reasons".

[Carole]

I don't know if this is anything to do with the problem you are encountering, but I uploaded a picture a couple of weeks ago to "Picture under construction" (or whatever it is called when it's not finished) and it uploaded OK, but have never been able to find it again, even under a search for my own items.

Carole

[Ian]

actually, when I said I can't help, I was referring to your second question, not the first.

It's doing the same to me, where I'm getting the login link when I go down into the album. However, if I then click to login, I get a polite message saying I'm already logged it.

Have you taken a look at the code that selects the menu? The login does appear to survive, it's just the menu doesn't agree...

[Ian]

actually, it's not as simple as that is it...

The gallery rendering isn't taking any notice of the login either. I can find images in my albums by playing with the "sort my pictures" menu but they're not displayed.

Are we still blaming Doug?

[Rick]

Yes, Carole, that's the same problem. I think it probably actually started happening for the PowWeb copy of the site before Doug tried uploading his photo, but the things he did were the first obvious flaws I spotted, and I discovered the login problem when I went to try to straighten them out...

What's happening is that the PowWeb site is generating new session IDs rather more frequently than it should, so when it goes to the database to see whether a session has an ID associated with it, it doesn't find one. I briefly ran both versions in debug, and the session ID kept changing on PowWeb, but remained constant on my test version.

[Ian]

are they changing each time or flip-flopping? It's interesting if you go back to the front page, it shows the logged in menu.

[Rick]

Not quite got to the bottom of it yet. It seems that you stay logged in if you go back to a page at which you were previously logged in... usually. You also get a "You are already logged in!" error if you try to log in again...

[Ian]

hence the question is it flip-flopping. It's like the website is using two different session IDs depending on where in the site you are. As an aside, what's our current disk usage at the moment?

[Rick]

Our disk use is a small fraction of PowWeb's allowance. They claim 265MB of website and 6MB of logs. They don't quote MySQL database use seperately, so I guess that's probably lumped in with the 265MB.

I've not noticed it flip-flopping, but I probably didn't run in debug long enough to test for sure...

I think the problem is partly with the code (and associated htaccess file) which tidies up links and makes them readable. However, the same code works fine on my home system...

[Ian]

thx for the data sizes.

I've just been looking at the cookie behaviour. Coppermine gives two cookies when you first hit the site (assuming none exist already). One is given a hash name, which I suspect is a session ID and the other is called cpg143_data. When you log on to the site no change is made to these cookies. They expire in 2 days for the "data" cookie and 2 weeks for the session cookie.

However, browsing down into the albums, coppermine then puts another session cookie on my machine. For whatever reason, to be determined, coppermine is not finding, or taking notice of the existing session cookie. Further browsing does not cause coppermine to give any more cookies.

Deleting the cookies does not change the behaviour.

[Rick]

Yep. That matches what I've observed. The route to the solution probably involves answering "Why does it set the second session cookie?". Trouble is I've not been able to provoke that mis-behaviour on the copies of the gallery on my home system, which remain stubbornly well-behaved...

[Rick]

Curiously, disable the plugin which turns the links into something manageable, and the problem mostly goes away... 

Trouble is, that'll break a whole bunch of the links out there... 

[Rick]

It looks (he say, with fingers crossed) as if EZPZ does not have the problem PowWeb had with this...