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[drupal-devel] [feature] "remember me" doesn't work
by kbahey 13 Feb '05

13 Feb '05

Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: user.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: kbahey Reported by: marco Updated by: kbahey Status: patch No one suggested that we should give the end user, nor the sysadmin the number of seconds. Even the patch as it stands today does not do that, but displays: 1 day, 2 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, ....etc. So, on the login screen, there would be a "remember me" checkbox. Then in the admin screens there would be an option like the one above for how long this 'remembering' should be. If someone answers the last two paragraphs in #69, I can get this done soon. kbahey Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2003 - 08:37 : marco "remember me" checkbox in the login box doesn't work; even if the checkbox is left unchecked the user is NOT forgotten when he quits the browser. Try logging in w/o "remember me", then quit the browser and open it again: you should be still logged in. What happens: when you login w/o checkbox user.module outputs a cookie with lifetime = 0 ("until session ends"); but user.module calls session_start() at the beginning, which outputs a cookie too, with the lifetime specified in .htaccess; and session_start() outputs this cookie always, so on the next page the cookie from user_login() will be overwritten. I run Mozilla 1.4; I can replicate with Drupal 4.0 and Drupal 4.2 on PHP 4.3.3, and I can replicate this on drupal.org which also runs PHP 4.3.3; OTOH I can't replicate on a site running Drupal 4.2 with PHP 4.2.2, which may mean session_start() changed with PHP 4.3.x; I looked in the changelog of PHP but couldn't find anything. I didn't have any report about this before upgrading to PHP 4.3.3, which also seems to strengthen the hypothesis of a changed behaviour in PHP. Another test I did also showed that with PHP 4.2.2 no cookie is printed by session_start() if a session cookie is found, while it is always printed in PHP 4.3.3; I double checked the configurations and didn't find anything which may cause this. If you want to investigate this, I suggest you to use Mozilla and Live HTTP Headers plugin. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 10, 2003 - 19:37 : moshe weitzman Can anyone confirm this? Also, how to fix? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 12:45 : axel(a)debian.linuxrulez.ru I agree it for Mozilla 1.0. On my site running on FreeBSD 4.7, PHP/4.3.0, Drupal CVS (Oct 3) this function also don't work. Though, with Galeon 1.2.5 cookie works ok. On localhost (Debian GNU/Linux 3.0, PHP 4.1.2, same Drupal cvs version) it works ok with Mozilla & Galeon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 13:34 : al The original bug report is surely due to Drupal needing to unset the cookie that it originally stored? To fix this bug, we therefore need a check on the user login/validation stage which forcibly unsets the cookie if you don't do "remember me". I suspect Axel's problems with one of his sites and not the other are due to him blocking a cookie originally and having that site on his Mozilla's list of sites to ban cookies from, or similar. Axel - if you are genuinely having issues with remember me not working at all (and not the fault originally described in this report by Ax) then please open a different bug report. Please make sure it's a genuine problem first - i.e. clear your blocked cookies sites list in Mozilla. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 18:24 : axel(a)debian.linuxrulez.ru Well. I don't sure what is a bug, therefore first post the question about it to forum [1]. Answer to that question point me to this bug report. Already several users of my site [2] report me about problem with "remember me" (I don't know which browsers they use). And there are not any blocked sites in my Mozilla cookies list - from site I receive only cookie PHPSESSID that expire time shows "at end of session". [1] http://drupal.org/node/view/3601 [2] http://debian.linuxrulez.ru ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 17, 2003 - 15:36 : dmo Expect "remember me" problems for users of Internet Explorer 6. Depending on the privacy settings, IE6 may automatically expire all cookies at the end of the browser session if your site doesn't have a compact P3P policy. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpriv/htm… and http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/10/04/p3p.html for further details. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 17, 2003 - 21:53 : moshe weitzman since noone can reproduce this, i am marking as 'by design' ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 02:41 : junyoung This is not a IE6 specific problem. I have seen the same symptom with IE5.5/6.0, Opera 7.0/7.1, and Konqueror 3.1.x so far. FWIW, my blog site is running with Drupal 4.2.0 + PHP 4.3.3. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 09:06 : remco(a)rc6.org Same problem on http://rc6.org, though the other way around. No matter what I do, my session will time out eventually. Tested using Opera 7.x, IE, Mozilla and Epiphany. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 10:00 : moshe weitzman reopening this case. i confirm the behavior that marco describes using rc6.org and drupal.org. i find it easiest to just turn cookie prompting on in order to watch what is happenning. what i am seeing, like marco described, is that our 'permanent cookie' which is supposed to last for a year is being overwritten in the next request with a standard session cookie that expires in the time frame specified in .htaccess. for drupal.org, standard sesson cookies last 1 month whereas the permanent cookie lasts for a year. i don't know how to fix this from within drupal. the cookie that we lay down for 'remember me' is working fine. the problem is the later overwrite which is caused by PHP's session handing, not drupal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 26, 2003 - 07:35 : moshe weitzman To make matters more complicated, I cannot reproduce this using PHP as an ISAPI module on IIS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 26, 2003 - 14:07 : Dries Maybe we can set a "remember" bit in the session table and periodically wipe users who don't have the "remember"-bit set. The wiping part could be added to sess_gc() ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 3, 2003 - 20:30 : joshk I have this problem w/musicforamerica.org The really maddening thing is that I have another install of drupal 4.3 on the same webserver and it works just fine. If the problem is with drupal's cookie being overwritten by a PHP session cookie, can this be fixed by giving the cookies different names? Sounds too simple to be the solution... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2003 - 11:48 : ykoehler http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.session-set-cookie-params.php Even though drupal is sending a cookie, it should always set this PHP parameter so that the session_start() call will use the same value, or not send any cookie at all by itself and let session_start() do it with, again, a call to this function to set the correct parameter. The reason why you don't get the same on a site basis is probably due to the different php.ini used for those sites as the default depends on the installation and not drupal which is probably why only some get the bug if there's such a thing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 30, 2003 - 15:50 : paul(a)murphymaphia.com I am having the opposite problem. Even if I check the "remember me" box my session ends when the browser closes and I'm forced to log in the next time I return to the site. No cookie is EVER set by my site. http://www.murphymaphia.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2004 - 12:31 : mathias Charles Miller has written a persistent login cookie best practices [3] i feel is worth reading. [3] http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/01/19/persistent_login_cookie_best_practi… ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 11, 2004 - 13:20 : paul(a)murphymaphia.com Has any progress been made on this? I have spent a lot of time in the code and can't manage to track this problem down. If anyone has any ideas, thoughts, etc to share, post them here so we can get this solved. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2004 - 00:07 : dmjossel I have this problem (remember me feature not working) in Drupal 4.3.x on PHP 4.3.2. I do NOT have it on Drupal 4.2 on PHP 4.3.2, in exactly the same environment. So perhaps sessions have changed in PHP 4.3.x, but this still didn't break Drupal 4.2, only 4.3.x. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 26, 2004 - 08:47 : moshe weitzman Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/_4drupal (5.3 KB) Here is a patch which attempts to resolve this problem. I took Josh's suggestion - just rename the permanent cookie so it get overwritten by the PHP session cookie. So this patch names our permanent cookie 'remember_me'. The value of this cookie is the current sessionID. This cookie is checked in sess_read(). It is set just as before, in user_login(). I refactored sess_read() a bit for cleaner flow. It uses a new helper function called sess_construct_user(). Feedback welcome. Since not everyone experienced a problem with remember me, I'm particlarly interested in feedback from those who did. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2004 - 05:43 : dmjossel No observable effect. Users who click "remember me" are still logged out after a period of inactivity or a browser restart, as is true in 4.3.2 (but not true in 4.2 on the same machine). Just out of curiosity I made similar changes in a copy of 4.3.2, renaming the cookie-- also with no effect. What *is* odd is that I used to see this problem using Drupal.org itself. But I seem now to have been logged in for quite awhile (several days) without having to reauthenticate, despite long periods of inactivity and browser restarts. Has some change other than this patch been made to CVS running on the live site? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2004 - 06:21 : dmjossel One more follow up: the patch re-enables the "remember me" button on logon and the preferences for the user.module, but not the "logout" button in the user info block. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 6, 2004 - 11:33 : moshe weitzman The logout link never left, so naturally this patch does not re-instate it. By "user-info" block, i'm guessing that you mean the 'Navigation' block which holds the menu(). Drupal.org issues session cookies for a month so you can remain logged in for a long time. Anyone else have feedback on this patch. It is working for me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 6, 2004 - 12:01 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Your patch works perfectly for me. I tested with three browsers (from Linux): Mozilla Firefox, Konquerer, Internet Explorer (via Wine) I did the following with each: 1) with latest CVS installation, I log in then restart my browser. I have to relogin. 2) I applied your patch to my CVS installation. 3) I logged in w/o checking "remember me". I then restart my browser, and I'm not logged in. 4) I logged in w/ "remember me" checked. I restart my browser, and I'm still logged in. 5) I logged in w/ "remember me" checked. I click logout, then restart my browser. I have to login again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 8, 2004 - 20:09 : Brian(a)brianpuccio.net Using weitzmann's patch works for me. I had no problem when running 4.3.0, 4.3.1, or 4.3.2 on my site, but adding 4.4.0 I had to log in each time. Applying the patch to my (next to stock, but ever so slightly modified) install of 4.4.0 fixes the problem and I am remembered across browser tab closings, browser closings and system restarts. Thank you greatly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2004 - 12:18 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/session.inc.patch (651 bytes) I believe there is a small bug in weitzman's patch. I've been running with it applied on KernelTrap.org for some time, with much positive feedback from users. However, I noticed that occasionally I become a phantom surfer -- I'm logged in and accessing pages, but I don't show up in the "Who's online" block. I suspect the online guests number is low, too. After a little digging, I came up with the attached simple patch. I have yet to confirm if it solves the phantom surfer problem. Essentially, when we log in with a cookie we also update the sessions table timestamp. To use, first apply weitzman's patch (earlier in this thread), then apply this one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2004 - 16:28 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/session.inc_0.patch (584 bytes) My earlier patch didn't work. It was redundant with sess_write(), and added nothing new. Hence, it didn't fix the "phantom user" that I've been experiencing. Now, however, I believe I fully understand what's going wrong. Essentially what's happening is a user is being loaded via the remember_me cookie, but their session id is different. Thus, the db_query in sess_write() fails to update a user session in the database. This patch detects that failure and acts accordingly by creating a new entry. This patch applies against drupal 4.4 with weitzman's patch [4] applied. [4] http://drupal.org/files/issues/_4drupal ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 15, 2004 - 02:39 : mabster Still seems to be a bit flakey. I get logged out every once in a while at work for some reason (during the day). And every time I move from my work to my home machines (or vice versa) I need to login again. Does the cookie base itself on my IP address or something? Could it be that because I'm switching between two different PCs that it can't remember my session details? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2004 - 21:19 : dmjossel I've upgraded the site Rampancy.net to Drupal 4.4 and applied Weitzman's patch. The behavior I'm seeing now I don't completely understand. Logging in to the site, you can quit the browser and stay logged in. But after a period of inactivity, somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes, the session expires and you have to log in again. I don't see this behavior on drupal.org. php.ini on the server is set for session cookies to last for 30 days. Drupal, by default, is supposed to give cookies that last 1 year. Is there anything else I should be looking at? Apparently some admins have this problem and others don't. Server info: FreeBSD synfibers.com 4.7-RELEASE-p22 FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p22 #29: Tu i386 Apache/1.3.27 OpenSSL/0.9.7 (Unix) PHP/4.3.4 registered session save handlers are files and user. (local value is user) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2004 - 22:20 : mabster Yes, dmjossel's description matches the behaviour on my site (www.madprops.org) We're a hosted site, so I'm not exactly sure of the server's details. I'm fairly certain it's Windows2003. Definitely a Windows flavour, anyway, which means that this problem (with the patch applied) is not restricted to Linux. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 05:26 : dmjossel Apologies first for using this like a forum... mabster, upload a file to the server with the phpinfo(); in it (inside PHP tags of course). What values does it show for cookie-related functions? For session_save_handler? Perhaps there is a common element in server configuration in these two cases, despite the different operating systems. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 05:48 : mabster session.save_handler = files session.cookie_domain = no value session.cookie_lifetime = 0 session.cookie_path = / session.use_cookies = On session.use_only_cookie = Off Other info (at least until someone tells me that publishing this info is dangerous and I remove the file) here [5]. [5] http://www.madprops.org/info.php ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 11:12 : dmjossel Suggestions... try setting session.use_only_cookies =1 either in php.ini, or if you don't have access to that, by using ini_set in drupal's php.conf and see if that has any effect. Next change Drupal's site configuration for the user module, and toggle whether you allow users to choose whether or not to be logged out (this produces the "remember me" cookie if you've installed weitzman's patch) or choose "users are never logged out". Neither of these seem to help here, but perhaps they'd help you. I noticed that until I set my browser to "accept all cookies automatically" and set session.use_only_cookies =1, I was getting the PHPSESSID cookie, but not the remember_me cookie. Now I get them both... but still logged out after 30 minutes of idle time, no matter what. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 11:26 : moshe weitzman those are not the session values that ship with drupal (see .htaccess file). for example, session_save_handler has to be 'user'. otherwise, you are not using drupal's session table and your 'remember me' will fail. since you are using IIS, you have to set your php.ini with values like those found in .htaccess. .htaccess files are only respected by Apache (and even then, not always. depends on your web host). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 19:39 : mabster Just out of interest, weitzman: How does drupal.org's 'remember me' work? I installed a cookie inspector on my machine at work, and didn't see any 'remember me' values in drupal.org's cookie. Does it use a different system? I will see what our host can do about changing the php.ini values. Since there are many sites hosted on that one box, it'll be a long shot to get them to change it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2004 - 12:21 : dmjossel Try tweaking the value of session.gc_maxlifetime either in the .htaccess file or in php.ini. The default value in the .htaccess file seems to be 1440 seconds-- or 24 minutes, almost exactly the amount of time my sessions were lasting before being forced to log in again. I've increased this value, and now I'm seeing the remember_me cookie stay with the same value, while the PHPSESSID cookie is constantly being replaced by a new one-- but I don't have to log in again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2004 - 20:23 : dmjossel Well, it's the next morning here, and I'm still logged in at Rampancy.net and the other Drupal 4.3 sites that are hosted on the same machine. I think at least this might be a workaround for those who have this problem and Weitzman's patch alone doesn't solve it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 25, 2004 - 20:02 : dmjossel After a longer period of inactivity (equal to the value of session.gc_maxlifetime) the sessions ALWAYS seem to log the user out, regardless of the remember_me cookie value, the PHPSESSID value, or the configuration settings for the user module. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 6, 2004 - 06:34 : Robert L I can confirm #41, have tried changing some of the sessions vars in .htaccess, but this did not solve the problem. Sessions are destroyed after some time of browser inactivity (some hours). At the browser side things look oke, it happens with Mozilla and IE. Have not tested the patch yet, I am not using the remember me cookie option, and this looks another unrelated (?) problem to me. I use PHP 4.3.6 with Apache 2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 5, 2004 - 21:41 : Anonymous I fixed it very simply by adding the line: session_set_cookie_params(0, "/dev/null"); immediately before the call to session_start(). This causes the cookie that PHP sets to only apply to the path "/dev/null" which, of course, doesn't exist. Thus, the cookie that Drupal's setcookie() call sets, with a path of "/", is held on to by the browser, and Drupal goes back to its old behaviour. It's a hack, but it works. A better long-term solution would be for Drupal to use the session_set_cookie_params() call to set the expiry time, rather than its own call to setcookie(). Tim Bates ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 6, 2004 - 12:37 : bertboerland(a)www.drop.org I am sorry to say, that adding a line like that in user.module doesnt do the trick for me (running php 4.2.3/drupal 4.). Can it be that this might work under certain conditions which differ from mine? Anyone else still working on this *critical* bug? I am not changing the status but I think it should still read "active"? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 8, 2004 - 03:58 : bertboerland(a)www.drop.org never mind my previous remark... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 9, 2004 - 20:53 : moshe weitzman perhaps someone will take interest in this bug. i hope not to release another drupal version without 'remember me'. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 13, 2004 - 16:49 : seanr This used to work for me. Now I hear it's been completely disabled. Why? I'd rather have a feature that works for most users and not some than not have the feature at all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2004 - 11:39 : Anonymous We dropped the whole 'remember me' posiibility in drupal 4.5. If it is - strategically seen - a good move, is another story, but now marked this as "Won't fix". ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2004 - 15:35 : moshe weitzman umm - thanks 'anonymous'. this is a valid feature request, even if it isn't a valid bug anymore. marking as such. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 13, 2004 - 22:45 : jasper this is a bug actually. If you don't think so, you really aren't thinking about user experience. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 19, 2004 - 13:48 : jasper I am having this problem with 4.5. After you login, the cookie that is set to expire in a month is overwritten by a session cookie, so remember me doesn;t work. I "fixed" this by hacking user.module to set its cookie to a non-existant path. Maybe that will mess something up. I notice that drupal.org overcomes this by setting the initial cookie to "host: drupal.org" and the second cookie to "domain: .drupal.org" Where is this documented? How do you do that? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 11:43 : Anonymous I was having the same problem. I changed user.module's call to setcookie() so that the cookie would expire after 2000000 seconds. That fixed it for me. Now I don't have to login every time I visit. I hope I didn't break anything else, though. setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), FALSE, $path); becomes: setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), time() + 2000000, $path); ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 22:03 : dtan Ya, suddenly noticed that I had to login everytime . . . not a huge deal, but is a bit of a pain. Should this be a configurable option for the site?? Obviously from the length of this issue, people feel it is a useful feature. . . dtan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 26, 2004 - 23:32 : tvst I WANT THIS FEATURE BACK! Sure, there were problems with it -- but let's fix the bug instead of killing a nice feature. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 3, 2004 - 18:02 : Goba Dries just committed a patch, which removes that superflous cookie setting, so session time in upcoming versions will be determined by the PHP settings, and short lived cookies will not be set. Until new versions are released, it is completely safe to remove the setcookie line in user.module (and the preg line above that), and it solves the problem of users needing to login everytime. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 5, 2004 - 01:02 : Anonymous wow. thanks. this was breaking my sites ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 12:06 : kbahey This way, the PHP settings are the ones that determine the session length. Wouldn't it be better to have an admin option that allows users to set their session length? with a global default for sessions (e.g. 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, ...etc.) If this option is enabled, then it can be overriden by the user individually too. This is a better scheme than having a forced global setting outside Drupal, on the PHP level for all users. What do others think? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 13:50 : kbahey Reviving this issue. The session length should be an option that the administrator, or the end user can set. We should not rely on the PHP settings alone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 11, 2005 - 19:54 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/use-module-session.patch (1.92 KB) I feel that removing the setcookie() call was not the right thing to do. Session length should not be relegated to .htaccess or php.ini, but should be an application feature. I am attaching a patch that reinstates this functionality via a configuration option. The sysadmin determines how long visitors should have their session for, and a cookie is set for them with the appropriate lifetime. Please look at this rationally and objectively and do not dismiss it offhand because 'too many options are bad'. I had to go through php.ini and .htaccess hell for the last few months because my hosting company has implemented PHP suExec (hence .htaccess cannot set php parameters), then moved to another machine with .htaccess reinstated. This also allows people (like me) who serve several domains from a single Drupal installation to set the session length differently for different domains. Moreover, the Drupal end user should not have to go through fiddling with .htaccess values to get this functionality back. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 06:51 : Bèr Kessels -1 for yet another config option. Thisis a (very) advanced feuature, that will never have to be changed on a site. Therefore we need to give it a good default, and if people really want to chage it, those few can do so in conf.php. Bèr ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 08:57 : Goba Please *do not use setcookie()* to overwrite the session cookie! The problem before was that $path and $domain were not the same as set by the session handler cookie, and so the session handler cookie was not overwritten. This behaviour depends on host configuration... See, you introduce a $path variable in your patch, which is not set, and you don't care about the cookie domain... These were the main problems with the previous aproach, and this is why the setcookie() was removed. You should deal directly with the session ini settings! So please ini_set() the session cookie lifetime, if .htaccess is not enough for you, and let the session handler set the proper cookie. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 09:59 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user-module-session-2.patch (8.89 KB) Getting the sysadmin to tweek the .htaccess or php.ini is a tedious thing. If we can provide a better interface for them to do this, then it is better. Every time PHP gets upgraded by my hosting company or move machines, things do not work. With this patch, the sysadmin can set how long sessions are valid for. This version of the patch still overrides the session cookie, but uses the correct path. I am seeing reluctance to putting this in CVS, based on 'yet another option' objection, or it being a cookie. While I can sympathise with the objections, and see their point of view, I do not see another solution being proposed to those who asked for this feature to be brought back. See for example comments 46, 49, and 54. Taking away a feature is not a good thing. I would rather have had this be an end user settable option (a global default for the site, and a per user settable option). Until the feature is back with a technical solution that is acceptable to the powers that be, users can use this patch for CVS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 10:14 : Goba kbahey, please, what is the problem with setting the ini setting with ini_set() runtime? It would work without fiddling with the $path and $domain... Also note that your patch contains a lot of unrelated changes... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 11:06 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user-module-session-3.patch (2.04 KB) Sorry. The patch was for a lot of things by mistake. Here is the patch only for user.module. As for ini_set(), I can do: ini_set ("session.cookie_lifetime", number_of_seconds); But again, number_of_seconds has to be stored in a varaible, which will be another option. Will we get the objection "no more options" again? However, as I understand it, ini_set() has to be called before session_start() which is the first thing in includes/session.inc. Can variable_get() be called that early in Drupal life span to get the stored value? On a related note, why don't we have the following defaults set in conf.php, so regardless of .htaccess or php.ini, we ensure they are set in Drupal no matter what? ini_set ("session.cache_expire", 200000); ini_set ("session.gc_maxlifetime", 200000); ini_set ("session.auto_start", 0); ini_set ("session.save_handler", "user"); ini_set ("session.cache_limiter", "none"); ini_set ("session.use_trans_sid", 0); ini_set ("session.use_cookies", 1); ini_set ("session.use_only_cookies", 1); This also has the advantage that every domain in a multi-domain installation can have their own settings, if needed, instead of just one .htaccess. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 17:15 : Abalieno Excuse me, I'm one of the less experienced user of Drupal out there. This problem was HUGE for me because my installation, by default, remembered the sessions only for 20 minutes, then forcing me to relog. I've asked on the mailing list, I had peoples trying to register at my site to figure it out, I asked in other mailing lists. Nothing. At the end I discovered that it wasn't Drupal but a variable into php.ini (session.gc_maxlifetime). Noone was able to point me in the right direction. The last message I received from Mark Quinn is: "As for your PHP session issue, you may want to try and take it up with your hosting service, or wait until drupal properly resolves the issue with an application-managed cookie; I've not yet seen any discussion patches come through on this, myself. Maybe the Usual Suspects may have a better idea of whether someone is working on this part of the code, at present." At the end I was able to fix this by changing the php.ini. But it was a pain. I don't know from where comes the 'design choice' of 'not another setting'. This is a *basic* feature that on EVERY other engine can be set in the option. What is better? Something that you can notice easily in a configuration page or something that was set by someone else and there's no other way to change than to hack it yourself because the engine isn't flexible? "This a (very) advanced feature, that will never have to be changed on a site." No, this is a BASIC feature on EVERY engine. In general the users of a site need to set this by themselves, some want to be anonymous, some want to log it just once and forget, some want to log in once and remain logged forever. Not only this should be an option, but this should be also defined, by default, in the permissions panel. So that each member can set the cookie in the preferred way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 18:47 : kbahey This is exactly what I mean: we removed a feature and did not provide a replacement. My attempt to reintroduce the feature, admittedly having some drawbacks, was dimissed with no alternative provided. Can we discuss the alternatives, and implement a solution before 4.6 is out? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 22:57 : Bèr Kessels I did provide an alternative, only not in so much words: Use variable_set("site_cookie_lifetime",200000) and then ini_set to enforce a correct *default* lifetime. This will do for 99% ofthe drupal sites and users. For those 1% that want to control everything: use a setting in settings.php: # Variable overrides: # # To override specific entries in the 'variable' table for this site, # set them here. You usually don't need to use this feature. This is # useful when used in a configuration file for a vhost or directory, # rather than the default settings.php. Any configuration setting from # the variable table can be given a new value. # # $conf = array( # 'site_name' => 'My Drupal site', # 'theme_default' => 'pushbutton', # 'anonymous' => 'Visitor' # ); Really: I visit a lot of geeky pages everyday, but never, ever have i even there seen an option to say how long a cookie will live on my HDD. Let alone on the joe-average site. We really do not want joe-average to give answers to questions like "how long should you remain logged in". The machines i.c..w admins should make that choice for him. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 23:19 : Anonymous To start with the last comment about no sites doing this, Google's own Gmail has a checkbox that says : "Keep me logged in for two weeks". Hotmail and Yahoo both have a check box "remember my password on this computer". Even Slashdot has such an option. So, it is a fairly common way to do things, and was present in Drupal but taken away. Now to the solution: You say "Use variable_set("site_cookie_lifetime",200000) and then ini_set to enforce a correct *default* lifetime. " So, we are still going to have an option to set and save the site_cookie_lifetime. So, I assume that part of the user.module patch will remain. Good! Now, for the ini_set() part. I see that it has to be called before session_start() is called. I asked above where it should go. Should it go in session.inc? If so, I can add it there, and that would be that. Regarding the second option: Which variable specifically should be overriden in the $conf array to achieve this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 23:20 : kbahey Oops! That was me. Drupal.org logged me out. Sort of relevant to the discussion ;-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 23:32 : Bèr Kessels to clarify: an option is: Session lifetime: [400000_________] provide the lifetime of your users sessions in seconds. A user option for this would be: username [__________] password [__________] session lifetime [__________] Those are unwanted. Wanted, however is: * No options in the interface, but in code only! * username [__________] password [__________] remember [x] That is my point, and not that we should not have a lifetime in PHP. -- View: http://drupal.org/node/2974 Edit: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/2974

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[drupal-devel] [feature] "remember me" doesn't work
by Bèr Kessels 13 Feb '05

13 Feb '05

Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: user.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: kbahey Reported by: marco Updated by: Bèr Kessels Status: patch to clarify: an option is: Session lifetime: [400000_________] provide the lifetime of your users sessions in seconds. A user option for this would be: username [__________] password [__________] session lifetime [__________] Those are unwanted. Wanted, however is: * No options in the interface, but in code only! * username [__________] password [__________] remember [x] That is my point, and not that we should not have a lifetime in PHP. Bèr Kessels Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2003 - 14:37 : marco "remember me" checkbox in the login box doesn't work; even if the checkbox is left unchecked the user is NOT forgotten when he quits the browser. Try logging in w/o "remember me", then quit the browser and open it again: you should be still logged in. What happens: when you login w/o checkbox user.module outputs a cookie with lifetime = 0 ("until session ends"); but user.module calls session_start() at the beginning, which outputs a cookie too, with the lifetime specified in .htaccess; and session_start() outputs this cookie always, so on the next page the cookie from user_login() will be overwritten. I run Mozilla 1.4; I can replicate with Drupal 4.0 and Drupal 4.2 on PHP 4.3.3, and I can replicate this on drupal.org which also runs PHP 4.3.3; OTOH I can't replicate on a site running Drupal 4.2 with PHP 4.2.2, which may mean session_start() changed with PHP 4.3.x; I looked in the changelog of PHP but couldn't find anything. I didn't have any report about this before upgrading to PHP 4.3.3, which also seems to strengthen the hypothesis of a changed behaviour in PHP. Another test I did also showed that with PHP 4.2.2 no cookie is printed by session_start() if a session cookie is found, while it is always printed in PHP 4.3.3; I double checked the configurations and didn't find anything which may cause this. If you want to investigate this, I suggest you to use Mozilla and Live HTTP Headers plugin. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 11, 2003 - 01:37 : moshe weitzman Can anyone confirm this? Also, how to fix? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 18:45 : axel(a)debian.linuxrulez.ru I agree it for Mozilla 1.0. On my site running on FreeBSD 4.7, PHP/4.3.0, Drupal CVS (Oct 3) this function also don't work. Though, with Galeon 1.2.5 cookie works ok. On localhost (Debian GNU/Linux 3.0, PHP 4.1.2, same Drupal cvs version) it works ok with Mozilla & Galeon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 19:34 : al The original bug report is surely due to Drupal needing to unset the cookie that it originally stored? To fix this bug, we therefore need a check on the user login/validation stage which forcibly unsets the cookie if you don't do "remember me". I suspect Axel's problems with one of his sites and not the other are due to him blocking a cookie originally and having that site on his Mozilla's list of sites to ban cookies from, or similar. Axel - if you are genuinely having issues with remember me not working at all (and not the fault originally described in this report by Ax) then please open a different bug report. Please make sure it's a genuine problem first - i.e. clear your blocked cookies sites list in Mozilla. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 13, 2003 - 00:24 : axel(a)debian.linuxrulez.ru Well. I don't sure what is a bug, therefore first post the question about it to forum [1]. Answer to that question point me to this bug report. Already several users of my site [2] report me about problem with "remember me" (I don't know which browsers they use). And there are not any blocked sites in my Mozilla cookies list - from site I receive only cookie PHPSESSID that expire time shows "at end of session". [1] http://drupal.org/node/view/3601 [2] http://debian.linuxrulez.ru ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 17, 2003 - 21:36 : dmo Expect "remember me" problems for users of Internet Explorer 6. Depending on the privacy settings, IE6 may automatically expire all cookies at the end of the browser session if your site doesn't have a compact P3P policy. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpriv/htm… and http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/10/04/p3p.html for further details. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 18, 2003 - 03:53 : moshe weitzman since noone can reproduce this, i am marking as 'by design' ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 08:41 : junyoung This is not a IE6 specific problem. I have seen the same symptom with IE5.5/6.0, Opera 7.0/7.1, and Konqueror 3.1.x so far. FWIW, my blog site is running with Drupal 4.2.0 + PHP 4.3.3. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 15:06 : remco(a)rc6.org Same problem on http://rc6.org, though the other way around. No matter what I do, my session will time out eventually. Tested using Opera 7.x, IE, Mozilla and Epiphany. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 16:00 : moshe weitzman reopening this case. i confirm the behavior that marco describes using rc6.org and drupal.org. i find it easiest to just turn cookie prompting on in order to watch what is happenning. what i am seeing, like marco described, is that our 'permanent cookie' which is supposed to last for a year is being overwritten in the next request with a standard session cookie that expires in the time frame specified in .htaccess. for drupal.org, standard sesson cookies last 1 month whereas the permanent cookie lasts for a year. i don't know how to fix this from within drupal. the cookie that we lay down for 'remember me' is working fine. the problem is the later overwrite which is caused by PHP's session handing, not drupal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 26, 2003 - 13:35 : moshe weitzman To make matters more complicated, I cannot reproduce this using PHP as an ISAPI module on IIS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 26, 2003 - 20:07 : Dries Maybe we can set a "remember" bit in the session table and periodically wipe users who don't have the "remember"-bit set. The wiping part could be added to sess_gc() ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 4, 2003 - 02:30 : joshk I have this problem w/musicforamerica.org The really maddening thing is that I have another install of drupal 4.3 on the same webserver and it works just fine. If the problem is with drupal's cookie being overwritten by a PHP session cookie, can this be fixed by giving the cookies different names? Sounds too simple to be the solution... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2003 - 17:48 : ykoehler http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.session-set-cookie-params.php Even though drupal is sending a cookie, it should always set this PHP parameter so that the session_start() call will use the same value, or not send any cookie at all by itself and let session_start() do it with, again, a call to this function to set the correct parameter. The reason why you don't get the same on a site basis is probably due to the different php.ini used for those sites as the default depends on the installation and not drupal which is probably why only some get the bug if there's such a thing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 30, 2003 - 21:50 : paul(a)murphymaphia.com I am having the opposite problem. Even if I check the "remember me" box my session ends when the browser closes and I'm forced to log in the next time I return to the site. No cookie is EVER set by my site. http://www.murphymaphia.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2004 - 18:31 : mathias Charles Miller has written a persistent login cookie best practices [3] i feel is worth reading. [3] http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/01/19/persistent_login_cookie_best_practi… ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 11, 2004 - 19:20 : paul(a)murphymaphia.com Has any progress been made on this? I have spent a lot of time in the code and can't manage to track this problem down. If anyone has any ideas, thoughts, etc to share, post them here so we can get this solved. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2004 - 06:07 : dmjossel I have this problem (remember me feature not working) in Drupal 4.3.x on PHP 4.3.2. I do NOT have it on Drupal 4.2 on PHP 4.3.2, in exactly the same environment. So perhaps sessions have changed in PHP 4.3.x, but this still didn't break Drupal 4.2, only 4.3.x. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 26, 2004 - 14:47 : moshe weitzman Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/_4drupal (5.3 KB) Here is a patch which attempts to resolve this problem. I took Josh's suggestion - just rename the permanent cookie so it get overwritten by the PHP session cookie. So this patch names our permanent cookie 'remember_me'. The value of this cookie is the current sessionID. This cookie is checked in sess_read(). It is set just as before, in user_login(). I refactored sess_read() a bit for cleaner flow. It uses a new helper function called sess_construct_user(). Feedback welcome. Since not everyone experienced a problem with remember me, I'm particlarly interested in feedback from those who did. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2004 - 11:43 : dmjossel No observable effect. Users who click "remember me" are still logged out after a period of inactivity or a browser restart, as is true in 4.3.2 (but not true in 4.2 on the same machine). Just out of curiosity I made similar changes in a copy of 4.3.2, renaming the cookie-- also with no effect. What *is* odd is that I used to see this problem using Drupal.org itself. But I seem now to have been logged in for quite awhile (several days) without having to reauthenticate, despite long periods of inactivity and browser restarts. Has some change other than this patch been made to CVS running on the live site? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2004 - 12:21 : dmjossel One more follow up: the patch re-enables the "remember me" button on logon and the preferences for the user.module, but not the "logout" button in the user info block. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 6, 2004 - 17:33 : moshe weitzman The logout link never left, so naturally this patch does not re-instate it. By "user-info" block, i'm guessing that you mean the 'Navigation' block which holds the menu(). Drupal.org issues session cookies for a month so you can remain logged in for a long time. Anyone else have feedback on this patch. It is working for me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 6, 2004 - 18:01 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Your patch works perfectly for me. I tested with three browsers (from Linux): Mozilla Firefox, Konquerer, Internet Explorer (via Wine) I did the following with each: 1) with latest CVS installation, I log in then restart my browser. I have to relogin. 2) I applied your patch to my CVS installation. 3) I logged in w/o checking "remember me". I then restart my browser, and I'm not logged in. 4) I logged in w/ "remember me" checked. I restart my browser, and I'm still logged in. 5) I logged in w/ "remember me" checked. I click logout, then restart my browser. I have to login again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 9, 2004 - 02:09 : Brian(a)brianpuccio.net Using weitzmann's patch works for me. I had no problem when running 4.3.0, 4.3.1, or 4.3.2 on my site, but adding 4.4.0 I had to log in each time. Applying the patch to my (next to stock, but ever so slightly modified) install of 4.4.0 fixes the problem and I am remembered across browser tab closings, browser closings and system restarts. Thank you greatly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2004 - 18:18 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/session.inc.patch (651 bytes) I believe there is a small bug in weitzman's patch. I've been running with it applied on KernelTrap.org for some time, with much positive feedback from users. However, I noticed that occasionally I become a phantom surfer -- I'm logged in and accessing pages, but I don't show up in the "Who's online" block. I suspect the online guests number is low, too. After a little digging, I came up with the attached simple patch. I have yet to confirm if it solves the phantom surfer problem. Essentially, when we log in with a cookie we also update the sessions table timestamp. To use, first apply weitzman's patch (earlier in this thread), then apply this one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2004 - 22:28 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/session.inc_0.patch (584 bytes) My earlier patch didn't work. It was redundant with sess_write(), and added nothing new. Hence, it didn't fix the "phantom user" that I've been experiencing. Now, however, I believe I fully understand what's going wrong. Essentially what's happening is a user is being loaded via the remember_me cookie, but their session id is different. Thus, the db_query in sess_write() fails to update a user session in the database. This patch detects that failure and acts accordingly by creating a new entry. This patch applies against drupal 4.4 with weitzman's patch [4] applied. [4] http://drupal.org/files/issues/_4drupal ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 15, 2004 - 08:39 : mabster Still seems to be a bit flakey. I get logged out every once in a while at work for some reason (during the day). And every time I move from my work to my home machines (or vice versa) I need to login again. Does the cookie base itself on my IP address or something? Could it be that because I'm switching between two different PCs that it can't remember my session details? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2004 - 03:19 : dmjossel I've upgraded the site Rampancy.net to Drupal 4.4 and applied Weitzman's patch. The behavior I'm seeing now I don't completely understand. Logging in to the site, you can quit the browser and stay logged in. But after a period of inactivity, somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes, the session expires and you have to log in again. I don't see this behavior on drupal.org. php.ini on the server is set for session cookies to last for 30 days. Drupal, by default, is supposed to give cookies that last 1 year. Is there anything else I should be looking at? Apparently some admins have this problem and others don't. Server info: FreeBSD synfibers.com 4.7-RELEASE-p22 FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p22 #29: Tu i386 Apache/1.3.27 OpenSSL/0.9.7 (Unix) PHP/4.3.4 registered session save handlers are files and user. (local value is user) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2004 - 04:20 : mabster Yes, dmjossel's description matches the behaviour on my site (www.madprops.org) We're a hosted site, so I'm not exactly sure of the server's details. I'm fairly certain it's Windows2003. Definitely a Windows flavour, anyway, which means that this problem (with the patch applied) is not restricted to Linux. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 11:26 : dmjossel Apologies first for using this like a forum... mabster, upload a file to the server with the phpinfo(); in it (inside PHP tags of course). What values does it show for cookie-related functions? For session_save_handler? Perhaps there is a common element in server configuration in these two cases, despite the different operating systems. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 11:48 : mabster session.save_handler = files session.cookie_domain = no value session.cookie_lifetime = 0 session.cookie_path = / session.use_cookies = On session.use_only_cookie = Off Other info (at least until someone tells me that publishing this info is dangerous and I remove the file) here [5]. [5] http://www.madprops.org/info.php ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 17:12 : dmjossel Suggestions... try setting session.use_only_cookies =1 either in php.ini, or if you don't have access to that, by using ini_set in drupal's php.conf and see if that has any effect. Next change Drupal's site configuration for the user module, and toggle whether you allow users to choose whether or not to be logged out (this produces the "remember me" cookie if you've installed weitzman's patch) or choose "users are never logged out". Neither of these seem to help here, but perhaps they'd help you. I noticed that until I set my browser to "accept all cookies automatically" and set session.use_only_cookies =1, I was getting the PHPSESSID cookie, but not the remember_me cookie. Now I get them both... but still logged out after 30 minutes of idle time, no matter what. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 17:26 : moshe weitzman those are not the session values that ship with drupal (see .htaccess file). for example, session_save_handler has to be 'user'. otherwise, you are not using drupal's session table and your 'remember me' will fail. since you are using IIS, you have to set your php.ini with values like those found in .htaccess. .htaccess files are only respected by Apache (and even then, not always. depends on your web host). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2004 - 01:39 : mabster Just out of interest, weitzman: How does drupal.org's 'remember me' work? I installed a cookie inspector on my machine at work, and didn't see any 'remember me' values in drupal.org's cookie. Does it use a different system? I will see what our host can do about changing the php.ini values. Since there are many sites hosted on that one box, it'll be a long shot to get them to change it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2004 - 18:21 : dmjossel Try tweaking the value of session.gc_maxlifetime either in the .htaccess file or in php.ini. The default value in the .htaccess file seems to be 1440 seconds-- or 24 minutes, almost exactly the amount of time my sessions were lasting before being forced to log in again. I've increased this value, and now I'm seeing the remember_me cookie stay with the same value, while the PHPSESSID cookie is constantly being replaced by a new one-- but I don't have to log in again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 25, 2004 - 02:23 : dmjossel Well, it's the next morning here, and I'm still logged in at Rampancy.net and the other Drupal 4.3 sites that are hosted on the same machine. I think at least this might be a workaround for those who have this problem and Weitzman's patch alone doesn't solve it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 26, 2004 - 02:02 : dmjossel After a longer period of inactivity (equal to the value of session.gc_maxlifetime) the sessions ALWAYS seem to log the user out, regardless of the remember_me cookie value, the PHPSESSID value, or the configuration settings for the user module. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 6, 2004 - 12:34 : Robert L I can confirm #41, have tried changing some of the sessions vars in .htaccess, but this did not solve the problem. Sessions are destroyed after some time of browser inactivity (some hours). At the browser side things look oke, it happens with Mozilla and IE. Have not tested the patch yet, I am not using the remember me cookie option, and this looks another unrelated (?) problem to me. I use PHP 4.3.6 with Apache 2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 6, 2004 - 03:41 : Anonymous I fixed it very simply by adding the line: session_set_cookie_params(0, "/dev/null"); immediately before the call to session_start(). This causes the cookie that PHP sets to only apply to the path "/dev/null" which, of course, doesn't exist. Thus, the cookie that Drupal's setcookie() call sets, with a path of "/", is held on to by the browser, and Drupal goes back to its old behaviour. It's a hack, but it works. A better long-term solution would be for Drupal to use the session_set_cookie_params() call to set the expiry time, rather than its own call to setcookie(). Tim Bates ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 6, 2004 - 18:37 : bertboerland(a)www.drop.org I am sorry to say, that adding a line like that in user.module doesnt do the trick for me (running php 4.2.3/drupal 4.). Can it be that this might work under certain conditions which differ from mine? Anyone else still working on this *critical* bug? I am not changing the status but I think it should still read "active"? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 8, 2004 - 09:58 : bertboerland(a)www.drop.org never mind my previous remark... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 10, 2004 - 02:53 : moshe weitzman perhaps someone will take interest in this bug. i hope not to release another drupal version without 'remember me'. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 13, 2004 - 22:49 : seanr This used to work for me. Now I hear it's been completely disabled. Why? I'd rather have a feature that works for most users and not some than not have the feature at all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2004 - 17:39 : Anonymous We dropped the whole 'remember me' posiibility in drupal 4.5. If it is - strategically seen - a good move, is another story, but now marked this as "Won't fix". ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2004 - 21:35 : moshe weitzman umm - thanks 'anonymous'. this is a valid feature request, even if it isn't a valid bug anymore. marking as such. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 14, 2004 - 04:45 : jasper this is a bug actually. If you don't think so, you really aren't thinking about user experience. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 19, 2004 - 19:48 : jasper I am having this problem with 4.5. After you login, the cookie that is set to expire in a month is overwritten by a session cookie, so remember me doesn;t work. I "fixed" this by hacking user.module to set its cookie to a non-existant path. Maybe that will mess something up. I notice that drupal.org overcomes this by setting the initial cookie to "host: drupal.org" and the second cookie to "domain: .drupal.org" Where is this documented? How do you do that? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 17:43 : Anonymous I was having the same problem. I changed user.module's call to setcookie() so that the cookie would expire after 2000000 seconds. That fixed it for me. Now I don't have to login every time I visit. I hope I didn't break anything else, though. setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), FALSE, $path); becomes: setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), time() + 2000000, $path); ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 22, 2004 - 04:03 : dtan Ya, suddenly noticed that I had to login everytime . . . not a huge deal, but is a bit of a pain. Should this be a configurable option for the site?? Obviously from the length of this issue, people feel it is a useful feature. . . dtan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 05:32 : tvst I WANT THIS FEATURE BACK! Sure, there were problems with it -- but let's fix the bug instead of killing a nice feature. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 4, 2004 - 00:02 : Goba Dries just committed a patch, which removes that superflous cookie setting, so session time in upcoming versions will be determined by the PHP settings, and short lived cookies will not be set. Until new versions are released, it is completely safe to remove the setcookie line in user.module (and the preg line above that), and it solves the problem of users needing to login everytime. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 5, 2004 - 07:02 : Anonymous wow. thanks. this was breaking my sites ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 18:06 : kbahey This way, the PHP settings are the ones that determine the session length. Wouldn't it be better to have an admin option that allows users to set their session length? with a global default for sessions (e.g. 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, ...etc.) If this option is enabled, then it can be overriden by the user individually too. This is a better scheme than having a forced global setting outside Drupal, on the PHP level for all users. What do others think? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 19:50 : kbahey Reviving this issue. The session length should be an option that the administrator, or the end user can set. We should not rely on the PHP settings alone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 01:54 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/use-module-session.patch (1.92 KB) I feel that removing the setcookie() call was not the right thing to do. Session length should not be relegated to .htaccess or php.ini, but should be an application feature. I am attaching a patch that reinstates this functionality via a configuration option. The sysadmin determines how long visitors should have their session for, and a cookie is set for them with the appropriate lifetime. Please look at this rationally and objectively and do not dismiss it offhand because 'too many options are bad'. I had to go through php.ini and .htaccess hell for the last few months because my hosting company has implemented PHP suExec (hence .htaccess cannot set php parameters), then moved to another machine with .htaccess reinstated. This also allows people (like me) who serve several domains from a single Drupal installation to set the session length differently for different domains. Moreover, the Drupal end user should not have to go through fiddling with .htaccess values to get this functionality back. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 12:51 : Bèr Kessels -1 for yet another config option. Thisis a (very) advanced feuature, that will never have to be changed on a site. Therefore we need to give it a good default, and if people really want to chage it, those few can do so in conf.php. Bèr ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 14:57 : Goba Please *do not use setcookie()* to overwrite the session cookie! The problem before was that $path and $domain were not the same as set by the session handler cookie, and so the session handler cookie was not overwritten. This behaviour depends on host configuration... See, you introduce a $path variable in your patch, which is not set, and you don't care about the cookie domain... These were the main problems with the previous aproach, and this is why the setcookie() was removed. You should deal directly with the session ini settings! So please ini_set() the session cookie lifetime, if .htaccess is not enough for you, and let the session handler set the proper cookie. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 15:59 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user-module-session-2.patch (8.89 KB) Getting the sysadmin to tweek the .htaccess or php.ini is a tedious thing. If we can provide a better interface for them to do this, then it is better. Every time PHP gets upgraded by my hosting company or move machines, things do not work. With this patch, the sysadmin can set how long sessions are valid for. This version of the patch still overrides the session cookie, but uses the correct path. I am seeing reluctance to putting this in CVS, based on 'yet another option' objection, or it being a cookie. While I can sympathise with the objections, and see their point of view, I do not see another solution being proposed to those who asked for this feature to be brought back. See for example comments 46, 49, and 54. Taking away a feature is not a good thing. I would rather have had this be an end user settable option (a global default for the site, and a per user settable option). Until the feature is back with a technical solution that is acceptable to the powers that be, users can use this patch for CVS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 16:14 : Goba kbahey, please, what is the problem with setting the ini setting with ini_set() runtime? It would work without fiddling with the $path and $domain... Also note that your patch contains a lot of unrelated changes... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 17:06 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user-module-session-3.patch (2.04 KB) Sorry. The patch was for a lot of things by mistake. Here is the patch only for user.module. As for ini_set(), I can do: ini_set ("session.cookie_lifetime", number_of_seconds); But again, number_of_seconds has to be stored in a varaible, which will be another option. Will we get the objection "no more options" again? However, as I understand it, ini_set() has to be called before session_start() which is the first thing in includes/session.inc. Can variable_get() be called that early in Drupal life span to get the stored value? On a related note, why don't we have the following defaults set in conf.php, so regardless of .htaccess or php.ini, we ensure they are set in Drupal no matter what? ini_set ("session.cache_expire", 200000); ini_set ("session.gc_maxlifetime", 200000); ini_set ("session.auto_start", 0); ini_set ("session.save_handler", "user"); ini_set ("session.cache_limiter", "none"); ini_set ("session.use_trans_sid", 0); ini_set ("session.use_cookies", 1); ini_set ("session.use_only_cookies", 1); This also has the advantage that every domain in a multi-domain installation can have their own settings, if needed, instead of just one .htaccess. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 23:15 : Abalieno Excuse me, I'm one of the less experienced user of Drupal out there. This problem was HUGE for me because my installation, by default, remembered the sessions only for 20 minutes, then forcing me to relog. I've asked on the mailing list, I had peoples trying to register at my site to figure it out, I asked in other mailing lists. Nothing. At the end I discovered that it wasn't Drupal but a variable into php.ini (session.gc_maxlifetime). Noone was able to point me in the right direction. The last message I received from Mark Quinn is: "As for your PHP session issue, you may want to try and take it up with your hosting service, or wait until drupal properly resolves the issue with an application-managed cookie; I've not yet seen any discussion patches come through on this, myself. Maybe the Usual Suspects may have a better idea of whether someone is working on this part of the code, at present." At the end I was able to fix this by changing the php.ini. But it was a pain. I don't know from where comes the 'design choice' of 'not another setting'. This is a *basic* feature that on EVERY other engine can be set in the option. What is better? Something that you can notice easily in a configuration page or something that was set by someone else and there's no other way to change than to hack it yourself because the engine isn't flexible? "This a (very) advanced feature, that will never have to be changed on a site." No, this is a BASIC feature on EVERY engine. In general the users of a site need to set this by themselves, some want to be anonymous, some want to log it just once and forget, some want to log in once and remain logged forever. Not only this should be an option, but this should be also defined, by default, in the permissions panel. So that each member can set the cookie in the preferred way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 13, 2005 - 00:47 : kbahey This is exactly what I mean: we removed a feature and did not provide a replacement. My attempt to reintroduce the feature, admittedly having some drawbacks, was dimissed with no alternative provided. Can we discuss the alternatives, and implement a solution before 4.6 is out? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 13, 2005 - 04:57 : Bèr Kessels I did provide an alternative, only not in so much words: Use variable_set("site_cookie_lifetime",200000) and then ini_set to enforce a correct *default* lifetime. This will do for 99% ofthe drupal sites and users. For those 1% that want to control everything: use a setting in settings.php: # Variable overrides: # # To override specific entries in the 'variable' table for this site, # set them here. You usually don't need to use this feature. This is # useful when used in a configuration file for a vhost or directory, # rather than the default settings.php. Any configuration setting from # the variable table can be given a new value. # # $conf = array( # 'site_name' => 'My Drupal site', # 'theme_default' => 'pushbutton', # 'anonymous' => 'Visitor' # ); Really: I visit a lot of geeky pages everyday, but never, ever have i even there seen an option to say how long a cookie will live on my HDD. Let alone on the joe-average site. We really do not want joe-average to give answers to questions like "how long should you remain logged in". The machines i.c..w admins should make that choice for him. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 13, 2005 - 05:19 : Anonymous To start with the last comment about no sites doing this, Google's own Gmail has a checkbox that says : "Keep me logged in for two weeks". Hotmail and Yahoo both have a check box "remember my password on this computer". Even Slashdot has such an option. So, it is a fairly common way to do things, and was present in Drupal but taken away. Now to the solution: You say "Use variable_set("site_cookie_lifetime",200000) and then ini_set to enforce a correct *default* lifetime. " So, we are still going to have an option to set and save the site_cookie_lifetime. So, I assume that part of the user.module patch will remain. Good! Now, for the ini_set() part. I see that it has to be called before session_start() is called. I asked above where it should go. Should it go in session.inc? If so, I can add it there, and that would be that. Regarding the second option: Which variable specifically should be overriden in the $conf array to achieve this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 13, 2005 - 05:20 : kbahey Oops! That was me. Drupal.org logged me out. Sort of relevant to the discussion ;-) -- View: http://drupal.org/node/2974 Edit: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/2974

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[drupal-devel] [feature] "remember me" doesn't work
by kbahey 13 Feb '05

13 Feb '05

Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: user.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: kbahey Reported by: marco Updated by: kbahey Status: patch Oops! That was me. Drupal.org logged me out. Sort of relevant to the discussion ;-) kbahey Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2003 - 08:37 : marco "remember me" checkbox in the login box doesn't work; even if the checkbox is left unchecked the user is NOT forgotten when he quits the browser. Try logging in w/o "remember me", then quit the browser and open it again: you should be still logged in. What happens: when you login w/o checkbox user.module outputs a cookie with lifetime = 0 ("until session ends"); but user.module calls session_start() at the beginning, which outputs a cookie too, with the lifetime specified in .htaccess; and session_start() outputs this cookie always, so on the next page the cookie from user_login() will be overwritten. I run Mozilla 1.4; I can replicate with Drupal 4.0 and Drupal 4.2 on PHP 4.3.3, and I can replicate this on drupal.org which also runs PHP 4.3.3; OTOH I can't replicate on a site running Drupal 4.2 with PHP 4.2.2, which may mean session_start() changed with PHP 4.3.x; I looked in the changelog of PHP but couldn't find anything. I didn't have any report about this before upgrading to PHP 4.3.3, which also seems to strengthen the hypothesis of a changed behaviour in PHP. Another test I did also showed that with PHP 4.2.2 no cookie is printed by session_start() if a session cookie is found, while it is always printed in PHP 4.3.3; I double checked the configurations and didn't find anything which may cause this. If you want to investigate this, I suggest you to use Mozilla and Live HTTP Headers plugin. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 10, 2003 - 19:37 : moshe weitzman Can anyone confirm this? Also, how to fix? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 12:45 : axel(a)debian.linuxrulez.ru I agree it for Mozilla 1.0. On my site running on FreeBSD 4.7, PHP/4.3.0, Drupal CVS (Oct 3) this function also don't work. Though, with Galeon 1.2.5 cookie works ok. On localhost (Debian GNU/Linux 3.0, PHP 4.1.2, same Drupal cvs version) it works ok with Mozilla & Galeon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 13:34 : al The original bug report is surely due to Drupal needing to unset the cookie that it originally stored? To fix this bug, we therefore need a check on the user login/validation stage which forcibly unsets the cookie if you don't do "remember me". I suspect Axel's problems with one of his sites and not the other are due to him blocking a cookie originally and having that site on his Mozilla's list of sites to ban cookies from, or similar. Axel - if you are genuinely having issues with remember me not working at all (and not the fault originally described in this report by Ax) then please open a different bug report. Please make sure it's a genuine problem first - i.e. clear your blocked cookies sites list in Mozilla. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 18:24 : axel(a)debian.linuxrulez.ru Well. I don't sure what is a bug, therefore first post the question about it to forum [1]. Answer to that question point me to this bug report. Already several users of my site [2] report me about problem with "remember me" (I don't know which browsers they use). And there are not any blocked sites in my Mozilla cookies list - from site I receive only cookie PHPSESSID that expire time shows "at end of session". [1] http://drupal.org/node/view/3601 [2] http://debian.linuxrulez.ru ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 17, 2003 - 15:36 : dmo Expect "remember me" problems for users of Internet Explorer 6. Depending on the privacy settings, IE6 may automatically expire all cookies at the end of the browser session if your site doesn't have a compact P3P policy. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpriv/htm… and http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/10/04/p3p.html for further details. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 17, 2003 - 21:53 : moshe weitzman since noone can reproduce this, i am marking as 'by design' ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 02:41 : junyoung This is not a IE6 specific problem. I have seen the same symptom with IE5.5/6.0, Opera 7.0/7.1, and Konqueror 3.1.x so far. FWIW, my blog site is running with Drupal 4.2.0 + PHP 4.3.3. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 09:06 : remco(a)rc6.org Same problem on http://rc6.org, though the other way around. No matter what I do, my session will time out eventually. Tested using Opera 7.x, IE, Mozilla and Epiphany. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 10:00 : moshe weitzman reopening this case. i confirm the behavior that marco describes using rc6.org and drupal.org. i find it easiest to just turn cookie prompting on in order to watch what is happenning. what i am seeing, like marco described, is that our 'permanent cookie' which is supposed to last for a year is being overwritten in the next request with a standard session cookie that expires in the time frame specified in .htaccess. for drupal.org, standard sesson cookies last 1 month whereas the permanent cookie lasts for a year. i don't know how to fix this from within drupal. the cookie that we lay down for 'remember me' is working fine. the problem is the later overwrite which is caused by PHP's session handing, not drupal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 26, 2003 - 07:35 : moshe weitzman To make matters more complicated, I cannot reproduce this using PHP as an ISAPI module on IIS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 26, 2003 - 14:07 : Dries Maybe we can set a "remember" bit in the session table and periodically wipe users who don't have the "remember"-bit set. The wiping part could be added to sess_gc() ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 3, 2003 - 20:30 : joshk I have this problem w/musicforamerica.org The really maddening thing is that I have another install of drupal 4.3 on the same webserver and it works just fine. If the problem is with drupal's cookie being overwritten by a PHP session cookie, can this be fixed by giving the cookies different names? Sounds too simple to be the solution... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2003 - 11:48 : ykoehler http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.session-set-cookie-params.php Even though drupal is sending a cookie, it should always set this PHP parameter so that the session_start() call will use the same value, or not send any cookie at all by itself and let session_start() do it with, again, a call to this function to set the correct parameter. The reason why you don't get the same on a site basis is probably due to the different php.ini used for those sites as the default depends on the installation and not drupal which is probably why only some get the bug if there's such a thing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 30, 2003 - 15:50 : paul(a)murphymaphia.com I am having the opposite problem. Even if I check the "remember me" box my session ends when the browser closes and I'm forced to log in the next time I return to the site. No cookie is EVER set by my site. http://www.murphymaphia.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2004 - 12:31 : mathias Charles Miller has written a persistent login cookie best practices [3] i feel is worth reading. [3] http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/01/19/persistent_login_cookie_best_practi… ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 11, 2004 - 13:20 : paul(a)murphymaphia.com Has any progress been made on this? I have spent a lot of time in the code and can't manage to track this problem down. If anyone has any ideas, thoughts, etc to share, post them here so we can get this solved. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2004 - 00:07 : dmjossel I have this problem (remember me feature not working) in Drupal 4.3.x on PHP 4.3.2. I do NOT have it on Drupal 4.2 on PHP 4.3.2, in exactly the same environment. So perhaps sessions have changed in PHP 4.3.x, but this still didn't break Drupal 4.2, only 4.3.x. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 26, 2004 - 08:47 : moshe weitzman Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/_4drupal (5.3 KB) Here is a patch which attempts to resolve this problem. I took Josh's suggestion - just rename the permanent cookie so it get overwritten by the PHP session cookie. So this patch names our permanent cookie 'remember_me'. The value of this cookie is the current sessionID. This cookie is checked in sess_read(). It is set just as before, in user_login(). I refactored sess_read() a bit for cleaner flow. It uses a new helper function called sess_construct_user(). Feedback welcome. Since not everyone experienced a problem with remember me, I'm particlarly interested in feedback from those who did. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2004 - 05:43 : dmjossel No observable effect. Users who click "remember me" are still logged out after a period of inactivity or a browser restart, as is true in 4.3.2 (but not true in 4.2 on the same machine). Just out of curiosity I made similar changes in a copy of 4.3.2, renaming the cookie-- also with no effect. What *is* odd is that I used to see this problem using Drupal.org itself. But I seem now to have been logged in for quite awhile (several days) without having to reauthenticate, despite long periods of inactivity and browser restarts. Has some change other than this patch been made to CVS running on the live site? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2004 - 06:21 : dmjossel One more follow up: the patch re-enables the "remember me" button on logon and the preferences for the user.module, but not the "logout" button in the user info block. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 6, 2004 - 11:33 : moshe weitzman The logout link never left, so naturally this patch does not re-instate it. By "user-info" block, i'm guessing that you mean the 'Navigation' block which holds the menu(). Drupal.org issues session cookies for a month so you can remain logged in for a long time. Anyone else have feedback on this patch. It is working for me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 6, 2004 - 12:01 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Your patch works perfectly for me. I tested with three browsers (from Linux): Mozilla Firefox, Konquerer, Internet Explorer (via Wine) I did the following with each: 1) with latest CVS installation, I log in then restart my browser. I have to relogin. 2) I applied your patch to my CVS installation. 3) I logged in w/o checking "remember me". I then restart my browser, and I'm not logged in. 4) I logged in w/ "remember me" checked. I restart my browser, and I'm still logged in. 5) I logged in w/ "remember me" checked. I click logout, then restart my browser. I have to login again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 8, 2004 - 20:09 : Brian(a)brianpuccio.net Using weitzmann's patch works for me. I had no problem when running 4.3.0, 4.3.1, or 4.3.2 on my site, but adding 4.4.0 I had to log in each time. Applying the patch to my (next to stock, but ever so slightly modified) install of 4.4.0 fixes the problem and I am remembered across browser tab closings, browser closings and system restarts. Thank you greatly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2004 - 12:18 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/session.inc.patch (651 bytes) I believe there is a small bug in weitzman's patch. I've been running with it applied on KernelTrap.org for some time, with much positive feedback from users. However, I noticed that occasionally I become a phantom surfer -- I'm logged in and accessing pages, but I don't show up in the "Who's online" block. I suspect the online guests number is low, too. After a little digging, I came up with the attached simple patch. I have yet to confirm if it solves the phantom surfer problem. Essentially, when we log in with a cookie we also update the sessions table timestamp. To use, first apply weitzman's patch (earlier in this thread), then apply this one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2004 - 16:28 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/session.inc_0.patch (584 bytes) My earlier patch didn't work. It was redundant with sess_write(), and added nothing new. Hence, it didn't fix the "phantom user" that I've been experiencing. Now, however, I believe I fully understand what's going wrong. Essentially what's happening is a user is being loaded via the remember_me cookie, but their session id is different. Thus, the db_query in sess_write() fails to update a user session in the database. This patch detects that failure and acts accordingly by creating a new entry. This patch applies against drupal 4.4 with weitzman's patch [4] applied. [4] http://drupal.org/files/issues/_4drupal ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 15, 2004 - 02:39 : mabster Still seems to be a bit flakey. I get logged out every once in a while at work for some reason (during the day). And every time I move from my work to my home machines (or vice versa) I need to login again. Does the cookie base itself on my IP address or something? Could it be that because I'm switching between two different PCs that it can't remember my session details? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2004 - 21:19 : dmjossel I've upgraded the site Rampancy.net to Drupal 4.4 and applied Weitzman's patch. The behavior I'm seeing now I don't completely understand. Logging in to the site, you can quit the browser and stay logged in. But after a period of inactivity, somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes, the session expires and you have to log in again. I don't see this behavior on drupal.org. php.ini on the server is set for session cookies to last for 30 days. Drupal, by default, is supposed to give cookies that last 1 year. Is there anything else I should be looking at? Apparently some admins have this problem and others don't. Server info: FreeBSD synfibers.com 4.7-RELEASE-p22 FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p22 #29: Tu i386 Apache/1.3.27 OpenSSL/0.9.7 (Unix) PHP/4.3.4 registered session save handlers are files and user. (local value is user) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2004 - 22:20 : mabster Yes, dmjossel's description matches the behaviour on my site (www.madprops.org) We're a hosted site, so I'm not exactly sure of the server's details. I'm fairly certain it's Windows2003. Definitely a Windows flavour, anyway, which means that this problem (with the patch applied) is not restricted to Linux. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 05:26 : dmjossel Apologies first for using this like a forum... mabster, upload a file to the server with the phpinfo(); in it (inside PHP tags of course). What values does it show for cookie-related functions? For session_save_handler? Perhaps there is a common element in server configuration in these two cases, despite the different operating systems. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 05:48 : mabster session.save_handler = files session.cookie_domain = no value session.cookie_lifetime = 0 session.cookie_path = / session.use_cookies = On session.use_only_cookie = Off Other info (at least until someone tells me that publishing this info is dangerous and I remove the file) here [5]. [5] http://www.madprops.org/info.php ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 11:12 : dmjossel Suggestions... try setting session.use_only_cookies =1 either in php.ini, or if you don't have access to that, by using ini_set in drupal's php.conf and see if that has any effect. Next change Drupal's site configuration for the user module, and toggle whether you allow users to choose whether or not to be logged out (this produces the "remember me" cookie if you've installed weitzman's patch) or choose "users are never logged out". Neither of these seem to help here, but perhaps they'd help you. I noticed that until I set my browser to "accept all cookies automatically" and set session.use_only_cookies =1, I was getting the PHPSESSID cookie, but not the remember_me cookie. Now I get them both... but still logged out after 30 minutes of idle time, no matter what. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 11:26 : moshe weitzman those are not the session values that ship with drupal (see .htaccess file). for example, session_save_handler has to be 'user'. otherwise, you are not using drupal's session table and your 'remember me' will fail. since you are using IIS, you have to set your php.ini with values like those found in .htaccess. .htaccess files are only respected by Apache (and even then, not always. depends on your web host). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 19:39 : mabster Just out of interest, weitzman: How does drupal.org's 'remember me' work? I installed a cookie inspector on my machine at work, and didn't see any 'remember me' values in drupal.org's cookie. Does it use a different system? I will see what our host can do about changing the php.ini values. Since there are many sites hosted on that one box, it'll be a long shot to get them to change it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2004 - 12:21 : dmjossel Try tweaking the value of session.gc_maxlifetime either in the .htaccess file or in php.ini. The default value in the .htaccess file seems to be 1440 seconds-- or 24 minutes, almost exactly the amount of time my sessions were lasting before being forced to log in again. I've increased this value, and now I'm seeing the remember_me cookie stay with the same value, while the PHPSESSID cookie is constantly being replaced by a new one-- but I don't have to log in again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2004 - 20:23 : dmjossel Well, it's the next morning here, and I'm still logged in at Rampancy.net and the other Drupal 4.3 sites that are hosted on the same machine. I think at least this might be a workaround for those who have this problem and Weitzman's patch alone doesn't solve it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 25, 2004 - 20:02 : dmjossel After a longer period of inactivity (equal to the value of session.gc_maxlifetime) the sessions ALWAYS seem to log the user out, regardless of the remember_me cookie value, the PHPSESSID value, or the configuration settings for the user module. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 6, 2004 - 06:34 : Robert L I can confirm #41, have tried changing some of the sessions vars in .htaccess, but this did not solve the problem. Sessions are destroyed after some time of browser inactivity (some hours). At the browser side things look oke, it happens with Mozilla and IE. Have not tested the patch yet, I am not using the remember me cookie option, and this looks another unrelated (?) problem to me. I use PHP 4.3.6 with Apache 2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 5, 2004 - 21:41 : Anonymous I fixed it very simply by adding the line: session_set_cookie_params(0, "/dev/null"); immediately before the call to session_start(). This causes the cookie that PHP sets to only apply to the path "/dev/null" which, of course, doesn't exist. Thus, the cookie that Drupal's setcookie() call sets, with a path of "/", is held on to by the browser, and Drupal goes back to its old behaviour. It's a hack, but it works. A better long-term solution would be for Drupal to use the session_set_cookie_params() call to set the expiry time, rather than its own call to setcookie(). Tim Bates ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 6, 2004 - 12:37 : bertboerland(a)www.drop.org I am sorry to say, that adding a line like that in user.module doesnt do the trick for me (running php 4.2.3/drupal 4.). Can it be that this might work under certain conditions which differ from mine? Anyone else still working on this *critical* bug? I am not changing the status but I think it should still read "active"? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 8, 2004 - 03:58 : bertboerland(a)www.drop.org never mind my previous remark... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 9, 2004 - 20:53 : moshe weitzman perhaps someone will take interest in this bug. i hope not to release another drupal version without 'remember me'. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 13, 2004 - 16:49 : seanr This used to work for me. Now I hear it's been completely disabled. Why? I'd rather have a feature that works for most users and not some than not have the feature at all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2004 - 11:39 : Anonymous We dropped the whole 'remember me' posiibility in drupal 4.5. If it is - strategically seen - a good move, is another story, but now marked this as "Won't fix". ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2004 - 15:35 : moshe weitzman umm - thanks 'anonymous'. this is a valid feature request, even if it isn't a valid bug anymore. marking as such. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 13, 2004 - 22:45 : jasper this is a bug actually. If you don't think so, you really aren't thinking about user experience. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 19, 2004 - 13:48 : jasper I am having this problem with 4.5. After you login, the cookie that is set to expire in a month is overwritten by a session cookie, so remember me doesn;t work. I "fixed" this by hacking user.module to set its cookie to a non-existant path. Maybe that will mess something up. I notice that drupal.org overcomes this by setting the initial cookie to "host: drupal.org" and the second cookie to "domain: .drupal.org" Where is this documented? How do you do that? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 11:43 : Anonymous I was having the same problem. I changed user.module's call to setcookie() so that the cookie would expire after 2000000 seconds. That fixed it for me. Now I don't have to login every time I visit. I hope I didn't break anything else, though. setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), FALSE, $path); becomes: setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), time() + 2000000, $path); ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 22:03 : dtan Ya, suddenly noticed that I had to login everytime . . . not a huge deal, but is a bit of a pain. Should this be a configurable option for the site?? Obviously from the length of this issue, people feel it is a useful feature. . . dtan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 26, 2004 - 23:32 : tvst I WANT THIS FEATURE BACK! Sure, there were problems with it -- but let's fix the bug instead of killing a nice feature. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 3, 2004 - 18:02 : Goba Dries just committed a patch, which removes that superflous cookie setting, so session time in upcoming versions will be determined by the PHP settings, and short lived cookies will not be set. Until new versions are released, it is completely safe to remove the setcookie line in user.module (and the preg line above that), and it solves the problem of users needing to login everytime. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 5, 2004 - 01:02 : Anonymous wow. thanks. this was breaking my sites ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 12:06 : kbahey This way, the PHP settings are the ones that determine the session length. Wouldn't it be better to have an admin option that allows users to set their session length? with a global default for sessions (e.g. 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, ...etc.) If this option is enabled, then it can be overriden by the user individually too. This is a better scheme than having a forced global setting outside Drupal, on the PHP level for all users. What do others think? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 13:50 : kbahey Reviving this issue. The session length should be an option that the administrator, or the end user can set. We should not rely on the PHP settings alone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 11, 2005 - 19:54 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/use-module-session.patch (1.92 KB) I feel that removing the setcookie() call was not the right thing to do. Session length should not be relegated to .htaccess or php.ini, but should be an application feature. I am attaching a patch that reinstates this functionality via a configuration option. The sysadmin determines how long visitors should have their session for, and a cookie is set for them with the appropriate lifetime. Please look at this rationally and objectively and do not dismiss it offhand because 'too many options are bad'. I had to go through php.ini and .htaccess hell for the last few months because my hosting company has implemented PHP suExec (hence .htaccess cannot set php parameters), then moved to another machine with .htaccess reinstated. This also allows people (like me) who serve several domains from a single Drupal installation to set the session length differently for different domains. Moreover, the Drupal end user should not have to go through fiddling with .htaccess values to get this functionality back. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 06:51 : Bèr Kessels -1 for yet another config option. Thisis a (very) advanced feuature, that will never have to be changed on a site. Therefore we need to give it a good default, and if people really want to chage it, those few can do so in conf.php. Bèr ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 08:57 : Goba Please *do not use setcookie()* to overwrite the session cookie! The problem before was that $path and $domain were not the same as set by the session handler cookie, and so the session handler cookie was not overwritten. This behaviour depends on host configuration... See, you introduce a $path variable in your patch, which is not set, and you don't care about the cookie domain... These were the main problems with the previous aproach, and this is why the setcookie() was removed. You should deal directly with the session ini settings! So please ini_set() the session cookie lifetime, if .htaccess is not enough for you, and let the session handler set the proper cookie. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 09:59 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user-module-session-2.patch (8.89 KB) Getting the sysadmin to tweek the .htaccess or php.ini is a tedious thing. If we can provide a better interface for them to do this, then it is better. Every time PHP gets upgraded by my hosting company or move machines, things do not work. With this patch, the sysadmin can set how long sessions are valid for. This version of the patch still overrides the session cookie, but uses the correct path. I am seeing reluctance to putting this in CVS, based on 'yet another option' objection, or it being a cookie. While I can sympathise with the objections, and see their point of view, I do not see another solution being proposed to those who asked for this feature to be brought back. See for example comments 46, 49, and 54. Taking away a feature is not a good thing. I would rather have had this be an end user settable option (a global default for the site, and a per user settable option). Until the feature is back with a technical solution that is acceptable to the powers that be, users can use this patch for CVS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 10:14 : Goba kbahey, please, what is the problem with setting the ini setting with ini_set() runtime? It would work without fiddling with the $path and $domain... Also note that your patch contains a lot of unrelated changes... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 11:06 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user-module-session-3.patch (2.04 KB) Sorry. The patch was for a lot of things by mistake. Here is the patch only for user.module. As for ini_set(), I can do: ini_set ("session.cookie_lifetime", number_of_seconds); But again, number_of_seconds has to be stored in a varaible, which will be another option. Will we get the objection "no more options" again? However, as I understand it, ini_set() has to be called before session_start() which is the first thing in includes/session.inc. Can variable_get() be called that early in Drupal life span to get the stored value? On a related note, why don't we have the following defaults set in conf.php, so regardless of .htaccess or php.ini, we ensure they are set in Drupal no matter what? ini_set ("session.cache_expire", 200000); ini_set ("session.gc_maxlifetime", 200000); ini_set ("session.auto_start", 0); ini_set ("session.save_handler", "user"); ini_set ("session.cache_limiter", "none"); ini_set ("session.use_trans_sid", 0); ini_set ("session.use_cookies", 1); ini_set ("session.use_only_cookies", 1); This also has the advantage that every domain in a multi-domain installation can have their own settings, if needed, instead of just one .htaccess. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 17:15 : Abalieno Excuse me, I'm one of the less experienced user of Drupal out there. This problem was HUGE for me because my installation, by default, remembered the sessions only for 20 minutes, then forcing me to relog. I've asked on the mailing list, I had peoples trying to register at my site to figure it out, I asked in other mailing lists. Nothing. At the end I discovered that it wasn't Drupal but a variable into php.ini (session.gc_maxlifetime). Noone was able to point me in the right direction. The last message I received from Mark Quinn is: "As for your PHP session issue, you may want to try and take it up with your hosting service, or wait until drupal properly resolves the issue with an application-managed cookie; I've not yet seen any discussion patches come through on this, myself. Maybe the Usual Suspects may have a better idea of whether someone is working on this part of the code, at present." At the end I was able to fix this by changing the php.ini. But it was a pain. I don't know from where comes the 'design choice' of 'not another setting'. This is a *basic* feature that on EVERY other engine can be set in the option. What is better? Something that you can notice easily in a configuration page or something that was set by someone else and there's no other way to change than to hack it yourself because the engine isn't flexible? "This a (very) advanced feature, that will never have to be changed on a site." No, this is a BASIC feature on EVERY engine. In general the users of a site need to set this by themselves, some want to be anonymous, some want to log it just once and forget, some want to log in once and remain logged forever. Not only this should be an option, but this should be also defined, by default, in the permissions panel. So that each member can set the cookie in the preferred way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 18:47 : kbahey This is exactly what I mean: we removed a feature and did not provide a replacement. My attempt to reintroduce the feature, admittedly having some drawbacks, was dimissed with no alternative provided. Can we discuss the alternatives, and implement a solution before 4.6 is out? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 22:57 : Bèr Kessels I did provide an alternative, only not in so much words: Use variable_set("site_cookie_lifetime",200000) and then ini_set to enforce a correct *default* lifetime. This will do for 99% ofthe drupal sites and users. For those 1% that want to control everything: use a setting in settings.php: # Variable overrides: # # To override specific entries in the 'variable' table for this site, # set them here. You usually don't need to use this feature. This is # useful when used in a configuration file for a vhost or directory, # rather than the default settings.php. Any configuration setting from # the variable table can be given a new value. # # $conf = array( # 'site_name' => 'My Drupal site', # 'theme_default' => 'pushbutton', # 'anonymous' => 'Visitor' # ); Really: I visit a lot of geeky pages everyday, but never, ever have i even there seen an option to say how long a cookie will live on my HDD. Let alone on the joe-average site. We really do not want joe-average to give answers to questions like "how long should you remain logged in". The machines i.c..w admins should make that choice for him. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 23:19 : Anonymous To start with the last comment about no sites doing this, Google's own Gmail has a checkbox that says : "Keep me logged in for two weeks". Hotmail and Yahoo both have a check box "remember my password on this computer". Even Slashdot has such an option. So, it is a fairly common way to do things, and was present in Drupal but taken away. Now to the solution: You say "Use variable_set("site_cookie_lifetime",200000) and then ini_set to enforce a correct *default* lifetime. " So, we are still going to have an option to set and save the site_cookie_lifetime. So, I assume that part of the user.module patch will remain. Good! Now, for the ini_set() part. I see that it has to be called before session_start() is called. I asked above where it should go. Should it go in session.inc? If so, I can add it there, and that would be that. Regarding the second option: Which variable specifically should be overriden in the $conf array to achieve this? -- View: http://drupal.org/node/2974 Edit: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/2974

1 0

[drupal-devel] [feature] "remember me" doesn't work
by Anonymous 13 Feb '05

13 Feb '05

Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: user.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: kbahey Reported by: marco Updated by: Anonymous Status: patch To start with the last comment about no sites doing this, Google's own Gmail has a checkbox that says : "Keep me logged in for two weeks". Hotmail and Yahoo both have a check box "remember my password on this computer". Even Slashdot has such an option. So, it is a fairly common way to do things, and was present in Drupal but taken away. Now to the solution: You say "Use variable_set("site_cookie_lifetime",200000) and then ini_set to enforce a correct *default* lifetime. " So, we are still going to have an option to set and save the site_cookie_lifetime. So, I assume that part of the user.module patch will remain. Good! Now, for the ini_set() part. I see that it has to be called before session_start() is called. I asked above where it should go. Should it go in session.inc? If so, I can add it there, and that would be that. Regarding the second option: Which variable specifically should be overriden in the $conf array to achieve this? Anonymous Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2003 - 13:37 : marco "remember me" checkbox in the login box doesn't work; even if the checkbox is left unchecked the user is NOT forgotten when he quits the browser. Try logging in w/o "remember me", then quit the browser and open it again: you should be still logged in. What happens: when you login w/o checkbox user.module outputs a cookie with lifetime = 0 ("until session ends"); but user.module calls session_start() at the beginning, which outputs a cookie too, with the lifetime specified in .htaccess; and session_start() outputs this cookie always, so on the next page the cookie from user_login() will be overwritten. I run Mozilla 1.4; I can replicate with Drupal 4.0 and Drupal 4.2 on PHP 4.3.3, and I can replicate this on drupal.org which also runs PHP 4.3.3; OTOH I can't replicate on a site running Drupal 4.2 with PHP 4.2.2, which may mean session_start() changed with PHP 4.3.x; I looked in the changelog of PHP but couldn't find anything. I didn't have any report about this before upgrading to PHP 4.3.3, which also seems to strengthen the hypothesis of a changed behaviour in PHP. Another test I did also showed that with PHP 4.2.2 no cookie is printed by session_start() if a session cookie is found, while it is always printed in PHP 4.3.3; I double checked the configurations and didn't find anything which may cause this. If you want to investigate this, I suggest you to use Mozilla and Live HTTP Headers plugin. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 11, 2003 - 00:37 : moshe weitzman Can anyone confirm this? Also, how to fix? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 17:45 : axel(a)debian.linuxrulez.ru I agree it for Mozilla 1.0. On my site running on FreeBSD 4.7, PHP/4.3.0, Drupal CVS (Oct 3) this function also don't work. Though, with Galeon 1.2.5 cookie works ok. On localhost (Debian GNU/Linux 3.0, PHP 4.1.2, same Drupal cvs version) it works ok with Mozilla & Galeon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 18:34 : al The original bug report is surely due to Drupal needing to unset the cookie that it originally stored? To fix this bug, we therefore need a check on the user login/validation stage which forcibly unsets the cookie if you don't do "remember me". I suspect Axel's problems with one of his sites and not the other are due to him blocking a cookie originally and having that site on his Mozilla's list of sites to ban cookies from, or similar. Axel - if you are genuinely having issues with remember me not working at all (and not the fault originally described in this report by Ax) then please open a different bug report. Please make sure it's a genuine problem first - i.e. clear your blocked cookies sites list in Mozilla. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 23:24 : axel(a)debian.linuxrulez.ru Well. I don't sure what is a bug, therefore first post the question about it to forum [1]. Answer to that question point me to this bug report. Already several users of my site [2] report me about problem with "remember me" (I don't know which browsers they use). And there are not any blocked sites in my Mozilla cookies list - from site I receive only cookie PHPSESSID that expire time shows "at end of session". [1] http://drupal.org/node/view/3601 [2] http://debian.linuxrulez.ru ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 17, 2003 - 20:36 : dmo Expect "remember me" problems for users of Internet Explorer 6. Depending on the privacy settings, IE6 may automatically expire all cookies at the end of the browser session if your site doesn't have a compact P3P policy. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpriv/htm… and http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/10/04/p3p.html for further details. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 18, 2003 - 02:53 : moshe weitzman since noone can reproduce this, i am marking as 'by design' ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 07:41 : junyoung This is not a IE6 specific problem. I have seen the same symptom with IE5.5/6.0, Opera 7.0/7.1, and Konqueror 3.1.x so far. FWIW, my blog site is running with Drupal 4.2.0 + PHP 4.3.3. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 14:06 : remco(a)rc6.org Same problem on http://rc6.org, though the other way around. No matter what I do, my session will time out eventually. Tested using Opera 7.x, IE, Mozilla and Epiphany. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 15:00 : moshe weitzman reopening this case. i confirm the behavior that marco describes using rc6.org and drupal.org. i find it easiest to just turn cookie prompting on in order to watch what is happenning. what i am seeing, like marco described, is that our 'permanent cookie' which is supposed to last for a year is being overwritten in the next request with a standard session cookie that expires in the time frame specified in .htaccess. for drupal.org, standard sesson cookies last 1 month whereas the permanent cookie lasts for a year. i don't know how to fix this from within drupal. the cookie that we lay down for 'remember me' is working fine. the problem is the later overwrite which is caused by PHP's session handing, not drupal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 26, 2003 - 12:35 : moshe weitzman To make matters more complicated, I cannot reproduce this using PHP as an ISAPI module on IIS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 26, 2003 - 19:07 : Dries Maybe we can set a "remember" bit in the session table and periodically wipe users who don't have the "remember"-bit set. The wiping part could be added to sess_gc() ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 4, 2003 - 01:30 : joshk I have this problem w/musicforamerica.org The really maddening thing is that I have another install of drupal 4.3 on the same webserver and it works just fine. If the problem is with drupal's cookie being overwritten by a PHP session cookie, can this be fixed by giving the cookies different names? Sounds too simple to be the solution... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2003 - 16:48 : ykoehler http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.session-set-cookie-params.php Even though drupal is sending a cookie, it should always set this PHP parameter so that the session_start() call will use the same value, or not send any cookie at all by itself and let session_start() do it with, again, a call to this function to set the correct parameter. The reason why you don't get the same on a site basis is probably due to the different php.ini used for those sites as the default depends on the installation and not drupal which is probably why only some get the bug if there's such a thing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 30, 2003 - 20:50 : paul(a)murphymaphia.com I am having the opposite problem. Even if I check the "remember me" box my session ends when the browser closes and I'm forced to log in the next time I return to the site. No cookie is EVER set by my site. http://www.murphymaphia.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2004 - 17:31 : mathias Charles Miller has written a persistent login cookie best practices [3] i feel is worth reading. [3] http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/01/19/persistent_login_cookie_best_practi… ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 11, 2004 - 18:20 : paul(a)murphymaphia.com Has any progress been made on this? I have spent a lot of time in the code and can't manage to track this problem down. If anyone has any ideas, thoughts, etc to share, post them here so we can get this solved. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2004 - 05:07 : dmjossel I have this problem (remember me feature not working) in Drupal 4.3.x on PHP 4.3.2. I do NOT have it on Drupal 4.2 on PHP 4.3.2, in exactly the same environment. So perhaps sessions have changed in PHP 4.3.x, but this still didn't break Drupal 4.2, only 4.3.x. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 26, 2004 - 13:47 : moshe weitzman Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/_4drupal (5.3 KB) Here is a patch which attempts to resolve this problem. I took Josh's suggestion - just rename the permanent cookie so it get overwritten by the PHP session cookie. So this patch names our permanent cookie 'remember_me'. The value of this cookie is the current sessionID. This cookie is checked in sess_read(). It is set just as before, in user_login(). I refactored sess_read() a bit for cleaner flow. It uses a new helper function called sess_construct_user(). Feedback welcome. Since not everyone experienced a problem with remember me, I'm particlarly interested in feedback from those who did. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2004 - 10:43 : dmjossel No observable effect. Users who click "remember me" are still logged out after a period of inactivity or a browser restart, as is true in 4.3.2 (but not true in 4.2 on the same machine). Just out of curiosity I made similar changes in a copy of 4.3.2, renaming the cookie-- also with no effect. What *is* odd is that I used to see this problem using Drupal.org itself. But I seem now to have been logged in for quite awhile (several days) without having to reauthenticate, despite long periods of inactivity and browser restarts. Has some change other than this patch been made to CVS running on the live site? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2004 - 11:21 : dmjossel One more follow up: the patch re-enables the "remember me" button on logon and the preferences for the user.module, but not the "logout" button in the user info block. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 6, 2004 - 16:33 : moshe weitzman The logout link never left, so naturally this patch does not re-instate it. By "user-info" block, i'm guessing that you mean the 'Navigation' block which holds the menu(). Drupal.org issues session cookies for a month so you can remain logged in for a long time. Anyone else have feedback on this patch. It is working for me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 6, 2004 - 17:01 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Your patch works perfectly for me. I tested with three browsers (from Linux): Mozilla Firefox, Konquerer, Internet Explorer (via Wine) I did the following with each: 1) with latest CVS installation, I log in then restart my browser. I have to relogin. 2) I applied your patch to my CVS installation. 3) I logged in w/o checking "remember me". I then restart my browser, and I'm not logged in. 4) I logged in w/ "remember me" checked. I restart my browser, and I'm still logged in. 5) I logged in w/ "remember me" checked. I click logout, then restart my browser. I have to login again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 9, 2004 - 01:09 : Brian(a)brianpuccio.net Using weitzmann's patch works for me. I had no problem when running 4.3.0, 4.3.1, or 4.3.2 on my site, but adding 4.4.0 I had to log in each time. Applying the patch to my (next to stock, but ever so slightly modified) install of 4.4.0 fixes the problem and I am remembered across browser tab closings, browser closings and system restarts. Thank you greatly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2004 - 17:18 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/session.inc.patch (651 bytes) I believe there is a small bug in weitzman's patch. I've been running with it applied on KernelTrap.org for some time, with much positive feedback from users. However, I noticed that occasionally I become a phantom surfer -- I'm logged in and accessing pages, but I don't show up in the "Who's online" block. I suspect the online guests number is low, too. After a little digging, I came up with the attached simple patch. I have yet to confirm if it solves the phantom surfer problem. Essentially, when we log in with a cookie we also update the sessions table timestamp. To use, first apply weitzman's patch (earlier in this thread), then apply this one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2004 - 21:28 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/session.inc_0.patch (584 bytes) My earlier patch didn't work. It was redundant with sess_write(), and added nothing new. Hence, it didn't fix the "phantom user" that I've been experiencing. Now, however, I believe I fully understand what's going wrong. Essentially what's happening is a user is being loaded via the remember_me cookie, but their session id is different. Thus, the db_query in sess_write() fails to update a user session in the database. This patch detects that failure and acts accordingly by creating a new entry. This patch applies against drupal 4.4 with weitzman's patch [4] applied. [4] http://drupal.org/files/issues/_4drupal ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 15, 2004 - 07:39 : mabster Still seems to be a bit flakey. I get logged out every once in a while at work for some reason (during the day). And every time I move from my work to my home machines (or vice versa) I need to login again. Does the cookie base itself on my IP address or something? Could it be that because I'm switching between two different PCs that it can't remember my session details? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2004 - 02:19 : dmjossel I've upgraded the site Rampancy.net to Drupal 4.4 and applied Weitzman's patch. The behavior I'm seeing now I don't completely understand. Logging in to the site, you can quit the browser and stay logged in. But after a period of inactivity, somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes, the session expires and you have to log in again. I don't see this behavior on drupal.org. php.ini on the server is set for session cookies to last for 30 days. Drupal, by default, is supposed to give cookies that last 1 year. Is there anything else I should be looking at? Apparently some admins have this problem and others don't. Server info: FreeBSD synfibers.com 4.7-RELEASE-p22 FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p22 #29: Tu i386 Apache/1.3.27 OpenSSL/0.9.7 (Unix) PHP/4.3.4 registered session save handlers are files and user. (local value is user) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2004 - 03:20 : mabster Yes, dmjossel's description matches the behaviour on my site (www.madprops.org) We're a hosted site, so I'm not exactly sure of the server's details. I'm fairly certain it's Windows2003. Definitely a Windows flavour, anyway, which means that this problem (with the patch applied) is not restricted to Linux. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 10:26 : dmjossel Apologies first for using this like a forum... mabster, upload a file to the server with the phpinfo(); in it (inside PHP tags of course). What values does it show for cookie-related functions? For session_save_handler? Perhaps there is a common element in server configuration in these two cases, despite the different operating systems. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 10:48 : mabster session.save_handler = files session.cookie_domain = no value session.cookie_lifetime = 0 session.cookie_path = / session.use_cookies = On session.use_only_cookie = Off Other info (at least until someone tells me that publishing this info is dangerous and I remove the file) here [5]. [5] http://www.madprops.org/info.php ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 16:12 : dmjossel Suggestions... try setting session.use_only_cookies =1 either in php.ini, or if you don't have access to that, by using ini_set in drupal's php.conf and see if that has any effect. Next change Drupal's site configuration for the user module, and toggle whether you allow users to choose whether or not to be logged out (this produces the "remember me" cookie if you've installed weitzman's patch) or choose "users are never logged out". Neither of these seem to help here, but perhaps they'd help you. I noticed that until I set my browser to "accept all cookies automatically" and set session.use_only_cookies =1, I was getting the PHPSESSID cookie, but not the remember_me cookie. Now I get them both... but still logged out after 30 minutes of idle time, no matter what. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 16:26 : moshe weitzman those are not the session values that ship with drupal (see .htaccess file). for example, session_save_handler has to be 'user'. otherwise, you are not using drupal's session table and your 'remember me' will fail. since you are using IIS, you have to set your php.ini with values like those found in .htaccess. .htaccess files are only respected by Apache (and even then, not always. depends on your web host). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2004 - 00:39 : mabster Just out of interest, weitzman: How does drupal.org's 'remember me' work? I installed a cookie inspector on my machine at work, and didn't see any 'remember me' values in drupal.org's cookie. Does it use a different system? I will see what our host can do about changing the php.ini values. Since there are many sites hosted on that one box, it'll be a long shot to get them to change it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2004 - 17:21 : dmjossel Try tweaking the value of session.gc_maxlifetime either in the .htaccess file or in php.ini. The default value in the .htaccess file seems to be 1440 seconds-- or 24 minutes, almost exactly the amount of time my sessions were lasting before being forced to log in again. I've increased this value, and now I'm seeing the remember_me cookie stay with the same value, while the PHPSESSID cookie is constantly being replaced by a new one-- but I don't have to log in again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 25, 2004 - 01:23 : dmjossel Well, it's the next morning here, and I'm still logged in at Rampancy.net and the other Drupal 4.3 sites that are hosted on the same machine. I think at least this might be a workaround for those who have this problem and Weitzman's patch alone doesn't solve it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 26, 2004 - 01:02 : dmjossel After a longer period of inactivity (equal to the value of session.gc_maxlifetime) the sessions ALWAYS seem to log the user out, regardless of the remember_me cookie value, the PHPSESSID value, or the configuration settings for the user module. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 6, 2004 - 11:34 : Robert L I can confirm #41, have tried changing some of the sessions vars in .htaccess, but this did not solve the problem. Sessions are destroyed after some time of browser inactivity (some hours). At the browser side things look oke, it happens with Mozilla and IE. Have not tested the patch yet, I am not using the remember me cookie option, and this looks another unrelated (?) problem to me. I use PHP 4.3.6 with Apache 2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 6, 2004 - 02:41 : Anonymous I fixed it very simply by adding the line: session_set_cookie_params(0, "/dev/null"); immediately before the call to session_start(). This causes the cookie that PHP sets to only apply to the path "/dev/null" which, of course, doesn't exist. Thus, the cookie that Drupal's setcookie() call sets, with a path of "/", is held on to by the browser, and Drupal goes back to its old behaviour. It's a hack, but it works. A better long-term solution would be for Drupal to use the session_set_cookie_params() call to set the expiry time, rather than its own call to setcookie(). Tim Bates ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 6, 2004 - 17:37 : bertboerland(a)www.drop.org I am sorry to say, that adding a line like that in user.module doesnt do the trick for me (running php 4.2.3/drupal 4.). Can it be that this might work under certain conditions which differ from mine? Anyone else still working on this *critical* bug? I am not changing the status but I think it should still read "active"? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 8, 2004 - 08:58 : bertboerland(a)www.drop.org never mind my previous remark... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 10, 2004 - 01:53 : moshe weitzman perhaps someone will take interest in this bug. i hope not to release another drupal version without 'remember me'. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 13, 2004 - 21:49 : seanr This used to work for me. Now I hear it's been completely disabled. Why? I'd rather have a feature that works for most users and not some than not have the feature at all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2004 - 16:39 : Anonymous We dropped the whole 'remember me' posiibility in drupal 4.5. If it is - strategically seen - a good move, is another story, but now marked this as "Won't fix". ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2004 - 20:35 : moshe weitzman umm - thanks 'anonymous'. this is a valid feature request, even if it isn't a valid bug anymore. marking as such. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 14, 2004 - 03:45 : jasper this is a bug actually. If you don't think so, you really aren't thinking about user experience. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 19, 2004 - 18:48 : jasper I am having this problem with 4.5. After you login, the cookie that is set to expire in a month is overwritten by a session cookie, so remember me doesn;t work. I "fixed" this by hacking user.module to set its cookie to a non-existant path. Maybe that will mess something up. I notice that drupal.org overcomes this by setting the initial cookie to "host: drupal.org" and the second cookie to "domain: .drupal.org" Where is this documented? How do you do that? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 16:43 : Anonymous I was having the same problem. I changed user.module's call to setcookie() so that the cookie would expire after 2000000 seconds. That fixed it for me. Now I don't have to login every time I visit. I hope I didn't break anything else, though. setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), FALSE, $path); becomes: setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), time() + 2000000, $path); ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 22, 2004 - 03:03 : dtan Ya, suddenly noticed that I had to login everytime . . . not a huge deal, but is a bit of a pain. Should this be a configurable option for the site?? Obviously from the length of this issue, people feel it is a useful feature. . . dtan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 04:32 : tvst I WANT THIS FEATURE BACK! Sure, there were problems with it -- but let's fix the bug instead of killing a nice feature. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 3, 2004 - 23:02 : Goba Dries just committed a patch, which removes that superflous cookie setting, so session time in upcoming versions will be determined by the PHP settings, and short lived cookies will not be set. Until new versions are released, it is completely safe to remove the setcookie line in user.module (and the preg line above that), and it solves the problem of users needing to login everytime. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 5, 2004 - 06:02 : Anonymous wow. thanks. this was breaking my sites ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 17:06 : kbahey This way, the PHP settings are the ones that determine the session length. Wouldn't it be better to have an admin option that allows users to set their session length? with a global default for sessions (e.g. 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, ...etc.) If this option is enabled, then it can be overriden by the user individually too. This is a better scheme than having a forced global setting outside Drupal, on the PHP level for all users. What do others think? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 18:50 : kbahey Reviving this issue. The session length should be an option that the administrator, or the end user can set. We should not rely on the PHP settings alone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 00:54 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/use-module-session.patch (1.92 KB) I feel that removing the setcookie() call was not the right thing to do. Session length should not be relegated to .htaccess or php.ini, but should be an application feature. I am attaching a patch that reinstates this functionality via a configuration option. The sysadmin determines how long visitors should have their session for, and a cookie is set for them with the appropriate lifetime. Please look at this rationally and objectively and do not dismiss it offhand because 'too many options are bad'. I had to go through php.ini and .htaccess hell for the last few months because my hosting company has implemented PHP suExec (hence .htaccess cannot set php parameters), then moved to another machine with .htaccess reinstated. This also allows people (like me) who serve several domains from a single Drupal installation to set the session length differently for different domains. Moreover, the Drupal end user should not have to go through fiddling with .htaccess values to get this functionality back. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 11:51 : Bèr Kessels -1 for yet another config option. Thisis a (very) advanced feuature, that will never have to be changed on a site. Therefore we need to give it a good default, and if people really want to chage it, those few can do so in conf.php. Bèr ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 13:57 : Goba Please *do not use setcookie()* to overwrite the session cookie! The problem before was that $path and $domain were not the same as set by the session handler cookie, and so the session handler cookie was not overwritten. This behaviour depends on host configuration... See, you introduce a $path variable in your patch, which is not set, and you don't care about the cookie domain... These were the main problems with the previous aproach, and this is why the setcookie() was removed. You should deal directly with the session ini settings! So please ini_set() the session cookie lifetime, if .htaccess is not enough for you, and let the session handler set the proper cookie. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 14:59 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user-module-session-2.patch (8.89 KB) Getting the sysadmin to tweek the .htaccess or php.ini is a tedious thing. If we can provide a better interface for them to do this, then it is better. Every time PHP gets upgraded by my hosting company or move machines, things do not work. With this patch, the sysadmin can set how long sessions are valid for. This version of the patch still overrides the session cookie, but uses the correct path. I am seeing reluctance to putting this in CVS, based on 'yet another option' objection, or it being a cookie. While I can sympathise with the objections, and see their point of view, I do not see another solution being proposed to those who asked for this feature to be brought back. See for example comments 46, 49, and 54. Taking away a feature is not a good thing. I would rather have had this be an end user settable option (a global default for the site, and a per user settable option). Until the feature is back with a technical solution that is acceptable to the powers that be, users can use this patch for CVS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 15:14 : Goba kbahey, please, what is the problem with setting the ini setting with ini_set() runtime? It would work without fiddling with the $path and $domain... Also note that your patch contains a lot of unrelated changes... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 16:06 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user-module-session-3.patch (2.04 KB) Sorry. The patch was for a lot of things by mistake. Here is the patch only for user.module. As for ini_set(), I can do: ini_set ("session.cookie_lifetime", number_of_seconds); But again, number_of_seconds has to be stored in a varaible, which will be another option. Will we get the objection "no more options" again? However, as I understand it, ini_set() has to be called before session_start() which is the first thing in includes/session.inc. Can variable_get() be called that early in Drupal life span to get the stored value? On a related note, why don't we have the following defaults set in conf.php, so regardless of .htaccess or php.ini, we ensure they are set in Drupal no matter what? ini_set ("session.cache_expire", 200000); ini_set ("session.gc_maxlifetime", 200000); ini_set ("session.auto_start", 0); ini_set ("session.save_handler", "user"); ini_set ("session.cache_limiter", "none"); ini_set ("session.use_trans_sid", 0); ini_set ("session.use_cookies", 1); ini_set ("session.use_only_cookies", 1); This also has the advantage that every domain in a multi-domain installation can have their own settings, if needed, instead of just one .htaccess. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 22:15 : Abalieno Excuse me, I'm one of the less experienced user of Drupal out there. This problem was HUGE for me because my installation, by default, remembered the sessions only for 20 minutes, then forcing me to relog. I've asked on the mailing list, I had peoples trying to register at my site to figure it out, I asked in other mailing lists. Nothing. At the end I discovered that it wasn't Drupal but a variable into php.ini (session.gc_maxlifetime). Noone was able to point me in the right direction. The last message I received from Mark Quinn is: "As for your PHP session issue, you may want to try and take it up with your hosting service, or wait until drupal properly resolves the issue with an application-managed cookie; I've not yet seen any discussion patches come through on this, myself. Maybe the Usual Suspects may have a better idea of whether someone is working on this part of the code, at present." At the end I was able to fix this by changing the php.ini. But it was a pain. I don't know from where comes the 'design choice' of 'not another setting'. This is a *basic* feature that on EVERY other engine can be set in the option. What is better? Something that you can notice easily in a configuration page or something that was set by someone else and there's no other way to change than to hack it yourself because the engine isn't flexible? "This a (very) advanced feature, that will never have to be changed on a site." No, this is a BASIC feature on EVERY engine. In general the users of a site need to set this by themselves, some want to be anonymous, some want to log it just once and forget, some want to log in once and remain logged forever. Not only this should be an option, but this should be also defined, by default, in the permissions panel. So that each member can set the cookie in the preferred way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 23:47 : kbahey This is exactly what I mean: we removed a feature and did not provide a replacement. My attempt to reintroduce the feature, admittedly having some drawbacks, was dimissed with no alternative provided. Can we discuss the alternatives, and implement a solution before 4.6 is out? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 13, 2005 - 03:57 : Bèr Kessels I did provide an alternative, only not in so much words: Use variable_set("site_cookie_lifetime",200000) and then ini_set to enforce a correct *default* lifetime. This will do for 99% ofthe drupal sites and users. For those 1% that want to control everything: use a setting in settings.php: # Variable overrides: # # To override specific entries in the 'variable' table for this site, # set them here. You usually don't need to use this feature. This is # useful when used in a configuration file for a vhost or directory, # rather than the default settings.php. Any configuration setting from # the variable table can be given a new value. # # $conf = array( # 'site_name' => 'My Drupal site', # 'theme_default' => 'pushbutton', # 'anonymous' => 'Visitor' # ); Really: I visit a lot of geeky pages everyday, but never, ever have i even there seen an option to say how long a cookie will live on my HDD. Let alone on the joe-average site. We really do not want joe-average to give answers to questions like "how long should you remain logged in". The machines i.c..w admins should make that choice for him. -- View: http://drupal.org/node/2974 Edit: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/2974

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Re: [drupal-devel] Release schedule
by Boris Mann 13 Feb '05

13 Feb '05

On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 14:04:50 +0000, Gabor Hojtsy <gabor(a)hojtsy.hu> wrote: > >> Dries: you asked about the help texts on the drupal-docs list. For > >> some of the people there (me included), even just installing a CVS > >> build is a pain in the ass. If you really want this done, someone > >> needs to post the help texts, and then the doc team (among others) can > >> help update/rewrite. > > wiki.module on drupal.org? Book pages work -- just need to get the help texts *out* of code where they are buried. > An installer? ;P Haha, very funny. It's the entire process -- downloading a build (whether installer-enabled or not), a new DB, finding the help text, making changes, rolling a patch. Pretty much all of that is too hard to update some help texts. If someone posts help text to either a handbook page directly or to the drupal-docs list, members can help update, but it is likely we'll still have to rely on the good graces of the devel community to roll patches and get it back into CVS. -- Boris Mann http://www.bryght.com

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[drupal-devel] [feature] "remember me" doesn't work
by Bèr Kessels 13 Feb '05

13 Feb '05

Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: user.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: kbahey Reported by: marco Updated by: Bèr Kessels Status: patch I did provide an alternative, only not in so much words: Use variable_set("site_cookie_lifetime",200000) and then ini_set to enforce a correct *default* lifetime. This will do for 99% ofthe drupal sites and users. For those 1% that want to control everything: use a setting in settings.php: # Variable overrides: # # To override specific entries in the 'variable' table for this site, # set them here. You usually don't need to use this feature. This is # useful when used in a configuration file for a vhost or directory, # rather than the default settings.php. Any configuration setting from # the variable table can be given a new value. # # $conf = array( # 'site_name' => 'My Drupal site', # 'theme_default' => 'pushbutton', # 'anonymous' => 'Visitor' # ); Really: I visit a lot of geeky pages everyday, but never, ever have i even there seen an option to say how long a cookie will live on my HDD. Let alone on the joe-average site. We really do not want joe-average to give answers to questions like "how long should you remain logged in". The machines i.c..w admins should make that choice for him. Bèr Kessels Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2003 - 14:37 : marco "remember me" checkbox in the login box doesn't work; even if the checkbox is left unchecked the user is NOT forgotten when he quits the browser. Try logging in w/o "remember me", then quit the browser and open it again: you should be still logged in. What happens: when you login w/o checkbox user.module outputs a cookie with lifetime = 0 ("until session ends"); but user.module calls session_start() at the beginning, which outputs a cookie too, with the lifetime specified in .htaccess; and session_start() outputs this cookie always, so on the next page the cookie from user_login() will be overwritten. I run Mozilla 1.4; I can replicate with Drupal 4.0 and Drupal 4.2 on PHP 4.3.3, and I can replicate this on drupal.org which also runs PHP 4.3.3; OTOH I can't replicate on a site running Drupal 4.2 with PHP 4.2.2, which may mean session_start() changed with PHP 4.3.x; I looked in the changelog of PHP but couldn't find anything. I didn't have any report about this before upgrading to PHP 4.3.3, which also seems to strengthen the hypothesis of a changed behaviour in PHP. Another test I did also showed that with PHP 4.2.2 no cookie is printed by session_start() if a session cookie is found, while it is always printed in PHP 4.3.3; I double checked the configurations and didn't find anything which may cause this. If you want to investigate this, I suggest you to use Mozilla and Live HTTP Headers plugin. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 11, 2003 - 01:37 : moshe weitzman Can anyone confirm this? Also, how to fix? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 18:45 : axel(a)debian.linuxrulez.ru I agree it for Mozilla 1.0. On my site running on FreeBSD 4.7, PHP/4.3.0, Drupal CVS (Oct 3) this function also don't work. Though, with Galeon 1.2.5 cookie works ok. On localhost (Debian GNU/Linux 3.0, PHP 4.1.2, same Drupal cvs version) it works ok with Mozilla & Galeon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 19:34 : al The original bug report is surely due to Drupal needing to unset the cookie that it originally stored? To fix this bug, we therefore need a check on the user login/validation stage which forcibly unsets the cookie if you don't do "remember me". I suspect Axel's problems with one of his sites and not the other are due to him blocking a cookie originally and having that site on his Mozilla's list of sites to ban cookies from, or similar. Axel - if you are genuinely having issues with remember me not working at all (and not the fault originally described in this report by Ax) then please open a different bug report. Please make sure it's a genuine problem first - i.e. clear your blocked cookies sites list in Mozilla. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 13, 2003 - 00:24 : axel(a)debian.linuxrulez.ru Well. I don't sure what is a bug, therefore first post the question about it to forum [1]. Answer to that question point me to this bug report. Already several users of my site [2] report me about problem with "remember me" (I don't know which browsers they use). And there are not any blocked sites in my Mozilla cookies list - from site I receive only cookie PHPSESSID that expire time shows "at end of session". [1] http://drupal.org/node/view/3601 [2] http://debian.linuxrulez.ru ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 17, 2003 - 21:36 : dmo Expect "remember me" problems for users of Internet Explorer 6. Depending on the privacy settings, IE6 may automatically expire all cookies at the end of the browser session if your site doesn't have a compact P3P policy. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpriv/htm… and http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/10/04/p3p.html for further details. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 18, 2003 - 03:53 : moshe weitzman since noone can reproduce this, i am marking as 'by design' ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 08:41 : junyoung This is not a IE6 specific problem. I have seen the same symptom with IE5.5/6.0, Opera 7.0/7.1, and Konqueror 3.1.x so far. FWIW, my blog site is running with Drupal 4.2.0 + PHP 4.3.3. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 15:06 : remco(a)rc6.org Same problem on http://rc6.org, though the other way around. No matter what I do, my session will time out eventually. Tested using Opera 7.x, IE, Mozilla and Epiphany. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 16:00 : moshe weitzman reopening this case. i confirm the behavior that marco describes using rc6.org and drupal.org. i find it easiest to just turn cookie prompting on in order to watch what is happenning. what i am seeing, like marco described, is that our 'permanent cookie' which is supposed to last for a year is being overwritten in the next request with a standard session cookie that expires in the time frame specified in .htaccess. for drupal.org, standard sesson cookies last 1 month whereas the permanent cookie lasts for a year. i don't know how to fix this from within drupal. the cookie that we lay down for 'remember me' is working fine. the problem is the later overwrite which is caused by PHP's session handing, not drupal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 26, 2003 - 13:35 : moshe weitzman To make matters more complicated, I cannot reproduce this using PHP as an ISAPI module on IIS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 26, 2003 - 20:07 : Dries Maybe we can set a "remember" bit in the session table and periodically wipe users who don't have the "remember"-bit set. The wiping part could be added to sess_gc() ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 4, 2003 - 02:30 : joshk I have this problem w/musicforamerica.org The really maddening thing is that I have another install of drupal 4.3 on the same webserver and it works just fine. If the problem is with drupal's cookie being overwritten by a PHP session cookie, can this be fixed by giving the cookies different names? Sounds too simple to be the solution... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2003 - 17:48 : ykoehler http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.session-set-cookie-params.php Even though drupal is sending a cookie, it should always set this PHP parameter so that the session_start() call will use the same value, or not send any cookie at all by itself and let session_start() do it with, again, a call to this function to set the correct parameter. The reason why you don't get the same on a site basis is probably due to the different php.ini used for those sites as the default depends on the installation and not drupal which is probably why only some get the bug if there's such a thing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 30, 2003 - 21:50 : paul(a)murphymaphia.com I am having the opposite problem. Even if I check the "remember me" box my session ends when the browser closes and I'm forced to log in the next time I return to the site. No cookie is EVER set by my site. http://www.murphymaphia.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2004 - 18:31 : mathias Charles Miller has written a persistent login cookie best practices [3] i feel is worth reading. [3] http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/01/19/persistent_login_cookie_best_practi… ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 11, 2004 - 19:20 : paul(a)murphymaphia.com Has any progress been made on this? I have spent a lot of time in the code and can't manage to track this problem down. If anyone has any ideas, thoughts, etc to share, post them here so we can get this solved. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2004 - 06:07 : dmjossel I have this problem (remember me feature not working) in Drupal 4.3.x on PHP 4.3.2. I do NOT have it on Drupal 4.2 on PHP 4.3.2, in exactly the same environment. So perhaps sessions have changed in PHP 4.3.x, but this still didn't break Drupal 4.2, only 4.3.x. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 26, 2004 - 14:47 : moshe weitzman Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/_4drupal (5.3 KB) Here is a patch which attempts to resolve this problem. I took Josh's suggestion - just rename the permanent cookie so it get overwritten by the PHP session cookie. So this patch names our permanent cookie 'remember_me'. The value of this cookie is the current sessionID. This cookie is checked in sess_read(). It is set just as before, in user_login(). I refactored sess_read() a bit for cleaner flow. It uses a new helper function called sess_construct_user(). Feedback welcome. Since not everyone experienced a problem with remember me, I'm particlarly interested in feedback from those who did. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2004 - 11:43 : dmjossel No observable effect. Users who click "remember me" are still logged out after a period of inactivity or a browser restart, as is true in 4.3.2 (but not true in 4.2 on the same machine). Just out of curiosity I made similar changes in a copy of 4.3.2, renaming the cookie-- also with no effect. What *is* odd is that I used to see this problem using Drupal.org itself. But I seem now to have been logged in for quite awhile (several days) without having to reauthenticate, despite long periods of inactivity and browser restarts. Has some change other than this patch been made to CVS running on the live site? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2004 - 12:21 : dmjossel One more follow up: the patch re-enables the "remember me" button on logon and the preferences for the user.module, but not the "logout" button in the user info block. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 6, 2004 - 17:33 : moshe weitzman The logout link never left, so naturally this patch does not re-instate it. By "user-info" block, i'm guessing that you mean the 'Navigation' block which holds the menu(). Drupal.org issues session cookies for a month so you can remain logged in for a long time. Anyone else have feedback on this patch. It is working for me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 6, 2004 - 18:01 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Your patch works perfectly for me. I tested with three browsers (from Linux): Mozilla Firefox, Konquerer, Internet Explorer (via Wine) I did the following with each: 1) with latest CVS installation, I log in then restart my browser. I have to relogin. 2) I applied your patch to my CVS installation. 3) I logged in w/o checking "remember me". I then restart my browser, and I'm not logged in. 4) I logged in w/ "remember me" checked. I restart my browser, and I'm still logged in. 5) I logged in w/ "remember me" checked. I click logout, then restart my browser. I have to login again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 9, 2004 - 02:09 : Brian(a)brianpuccio.net Using weitzmann's patch works for me. I had no problem when running 4.3.0, 4.3.1, or 4.3.2 on my site, but adding 4.4.0 I had to log in each time. Applying the patch to my (next to stock, but ever so slightly modified) install of 4.4.0 fixes the problem and I am remembered across browser tab closings, browser closings and system restarts. Thank you greatly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2004 - 18:18 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/session.inc.patch (651 bytes) I believe there is a small bug in weitzman's patch. I've been running with it applied on KernelTrap.org for some time, with much positive feedback from users. However, I noticed that occasionally I become a phantom surfer -- I'm logged in and accessing pages, but I don't show up in the "Who's online" block. I suspect the online guests number is low, too. After a little digging, I came up with the attached simple patch. I have yet to confirm if it solves the phantom surfer problem. Essentially, when we log in with a cookie we also update the sessions table timestamp. To use, first apply weitzman's patch (earlier in this thread), then apply this one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2004 - 22:28 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/session.inc_0.patch (584 bytes) My earlier patch didn't work. It was redundant with sess_write(), and added nothing new. Hence, it didn't fix the "phantom user" that I've been experiencing. Now, however, I believe I fully understand what's going wrong. Essentially what's happening is a user is being loaded via the remember_me cookie, but their session id is different. Thus, the db_query in sess_write() fails to update a user session in the database. This patch detects that failure and acts accordingly by creating a new entry. This patch applies against drupal 4.4 with weitzman's patch [4] applied. [4] http://drupal.org/files/issues/_4drupal ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 15, 2004 - 08:39 : mabster Still seems to be a bit flakey. I get logged out every once in a while at work for some reason (during the day). And every time I move from my work to my home machines (or vice versa) I need to login again. Does the cookie base itself on my IP address or something? Could it be that because I'm switching between two different PCs that it can't remember my session details? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2004 - 03:19 : dmjossel I've upgraded the site Rampancy.net to Drupal 4.4 and applied Weitzman's patch. The behavior I'm seeing now I don't completely understand. Logging in to the site, you can quit the browser and stay logged in. But after a period of inactivity, somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes, the session expires and you have to log in again. I don't see this behavior on drupal.org. php.ini on the server is set for session cookies to last for 30 days. Drupal, by default, is supposed to give cookies that last 1 year. Is there anything else I should be looking at? Apparently some admins have this problem and others don't. Server info: FreeBSD synfibers.com 4.7-RELEASE-p22 FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p22 #29: Tu i386 Apache/1.3.27 OpenSSL/0.9.7 (Unix) PHP/4.3.4 registered session save handlers are files and user. (local value is user) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2004 - 04:20 : mabster Yes, dmjossel's description matches the behaviour on my site (www.madprops.org) We're a hosted site, so I'm not exactly sure of the server's details. I'm fairly certain it's Windows2003. Definitely a Windows flavour, anyway, which means that this problem (with the patch applied) is not restricted to Linux. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 11:26 : dmjossel Apologies first for using this like a forum... mabster, upload a file to the server with the phpinfo(); in it (inside PHP tags of course). What values does it show for cookie-related functions? For session_save_handler? Perhaps there is a common element in server configuration in these two cases, despite the different operating systems. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 11:48 : mabster session.save_handler = files session.cookie_domain = no value session.cookie_lifetime = 0 session.cookie_path = / session.use_cookies = On session.use_only_cookie = Off Other info (at least until someone tells me that publishing this info is dangerous and I remove the file) here [5]. [5] http://www.madprops.org/info.php ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 17:12 : dmjossel Suggestions... try setting session.use_only_cookies =1 either in php.ini, or if you don't have access to that, by using ini_set in drupal's php.conf and see if that has any effect. Next change Drupal's site configuration for the user module, and toggle whether you allow users to choose whether or not to be logged out (this produces the "remember me" cookie if you've installed weitzman's patch) or choose "users are never logged out". Neither of these seem to help here, but perhaps they'd help you. I noticed that until I set my browser to "accept all cookies automatically" and set session.use_only_cookies =1, I was getting the PHPSESSID cookie, but not the remember_me cookie. Now I get them both... but still logged out after 30 minutes of idle time, no matter what. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 17:26 : moshe weitzman those are not the session values that ship with drupal (see .htaccess file). for example, session_save_handler has to be 'user'. otherwise, you are not using drupal's session table and your 'remember me' will fail. since you are using IIS, you have to set your php.ini with values like those found in .htaccess. .htaccess files are only respected by Apache (and even then, not always. depends on your web host). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2004 - 01:39 : mabster Just out of interest, weitzman: How does drupal.org's 'remember me' work? I installed a cookie inspector on my machine at work, and didn't see any 'remember me' values in drupal.org's cookie. Does it use a different system? I will see what our host can do about changing the php.ini values. Since there are many sites hosted on that one box, it'll be a long shot to get them to change it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2004 - 18:21 : dmjossel Try tweaking the value of session.gc_maxlifetime either in the .htaccess file or in php.ini. The default value in the .htaccess file seems to be 1440 seconds-- or 24 minutes, almost exactly the amount of time my sessions were lasting before being forced to log in again. I've increased this value, and now I'm seeing the remember_me cookie stay with the same value, while the PHPSESSID cookie is constantly being replaced by a new one-- but I don't have to log in again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 25, 2004 - 02:23 : dmjossel Well, it's the next morning here, and I'm still logged in at Rampancy.net and the other Drupal 4.3 sites that are hosted on the same machine. I think at least this might be a workaround for those who have this problem and Weitzman's patch alone doesn't solve it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 26, 2004 - 02:02 : dmjossel After a longer period of inactivity (equal to the value of session.gc_maxlifetime) the sessions ALWAYS seem to log the user out, regardless of the remember_me cookie value, the PHPSESSID value, or the configuration settings for the user module. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 6, 2004 - 12:34 : Robert L I can confirm #41, have tried changing some of the sessions vars in .htaccess, but this did not solve the problem. Sessions are destroyed after some time of browser inactivity (some hours). At the browser side things look oke, it happens with Mozilla and IE. Have not tested the patch yet, I am not using the remember me cookie option, and this looks another unrelated (?) problem to me. I use PHP 4.3.6 with Apache 2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 6, 2004 - 03:41 : Anonymous I fixed it very simply by adding the line: session_set_cookie_params(0, "/dev/null"); immediately before the call to session_start(). This causes the cookie that PHP sets to only apply to the path "/dev/null" which, of course, doesn't exist. Thus, the cookie that Drupal's setcookie() call sets, with a path of "/", is held on to by the browser, and Drupal goes back to its old behaviour. It's a hack, but it works. A better long-term solution would be for Drupal to use the session_set_cookie_params() call to set the expiry time, rather than its own call to setcookie(). Tim Bates ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 6, 2004 - 18:37 : bertboerland(a)www.drop.org I am sorry to say, that adding a line like that in user.module doesnt do the trick for me (running php 4.2.3/drupal 4.). Can it be that this might work under certain conditions which differ from mine? Anyone else still working on this *critical* bug? I am not changing the status but I think it should still read "active"? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 8, 2004 - 09:58 : bertboerland(a)www.drop.org never mind my previous remark... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 10, 2004 - 02:53 : moshe weitzman perhaps someone will take interest in this bug. i hope not to release another drupal version without 'remember me'. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 13, 2004 - 22:49 : seanr This used to work for me. Now I hear it's been completely disabled. Why? I'd rather have a feature that works for most users and not some than not have the feature at all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2004 - 17:39 : Anonymous We dropped the whole 'remember me' posiibility in drupal 4.5. If it is - strategically seen - a good move, is another story, but now marked this as "Won't fix". ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2004 - 21:35 : moshe weitzman umm - thanks 'anonymous'. this is a valid feature request, even if it isn't a valid bug anymore. marking as such. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 14, 2004 - 04:45 : jasper this is a bug actually. If you don't think so, you really aren't thinking about user experience. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 19, 2004 - 19:48 : jasper I am having this problem with 4.5. After you login, the cookie that is set to expire in a month is overwritten by a session cookie, so remember me doesn;t work. I "fixed" this by hacking user.module to set its cookie to a non-existant path. Maybe that will mess something up. I notice that drupal.org overcomes this by setting the initial cookie to "host: drupal.org" and the second cookie to "domain: .drupal.org" Where is this documented? How do you do that? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 17:43 : Anonymous I was having the same problem. I changed user.module's call to setcookie() so that the cookie would expire after 2000000 seconds. That fixed it for me. Now I don't have to login every time I visit. I hope I didn't break anything else, though. setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), FALSE, $path); becomes: setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), time() + 2000000, $path); ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 22, 2004 - 04:03 : dtan Ya, suddenly noticed that I had to login everytime . . . not a huge deal, but is a bit of a pain. Should this be a configurable option for the site?? Obviously from the length of this issue, people feel it is a useful feature. . . dtan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 05:32 : tvst I WANT THIS FEATURE BACK! Sure, there were problems with it -- but let's fix the bug instead of killing a nice feature. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 4, 2004 - 00:02 : Goba Dries just committed a patch, which removes that superflous cookie setting, so session time in upcoming versions will be determined by the PHP settings, and short lived cookies will not be set. Until new versions are released, it is completely safe to remove the setcookie line in user.module (and the preg line above that), and it solves the problem of users needing to login everytime. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 5, 2004 - 07:02 : Anonymous wow. thanks. this was breaking my sites ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 18:06 : kbahey This way, the PHP settings are the ones that determine the session length. Wouldn't it be better to have an admin option that allows users to set their session length? with a global default for sessions (e.g. 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, ...etc.) If this option is enabled, then it can be overriden by the user individually too. This is a better scheme than having a forced global setting outside Drupal, on the PHP level for all users. What do others think? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 19:50 : kbahey Reviving this issue. The session length should be an option that the administrator, or the end user can set. We should not rely on the PHP settings alone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 01:54 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/use-module-session.patch (1.92 KB) I feel that removing the setcookie() call was not the right thing to do. Session length should not be relegated to .htaccess or php.ini, but should be an application feature. I am attaching a patch that reinstates this functionality via a configuration option. The sysadmin determines how long visitors should have their session for, and a cookie is set for them with the appropriate lifetime. Please look at this rationally and objectively and do not dismiss it offhand because 'too many options are bad'. I had to go through php.ini and .htaccess hell for the last few months because my hosting company has implemented PHP suExec (hence .htaccess cannot set php parameters), then moved to another machine with .htaccess reinstated. This also allows people (like me) who serve several domains from a single Drupal installation to set the session length differently for different domains. Moreover, the Drupal end user should not have to go through fiddling with .htaccess values to get this functionality back. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 12:51 : Bèr Kessels -1 for yet another config option. Thisis a (very) advanced feuature, that will never have to be changed on a site. Therefore we need to give it a good default, and if people really want to chage it, those few can do so in conf.php. Bèr ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 14:57 : Goba Please *do not use setcookie()* to overwrite the session cookie! The problem before was that $path and $domain were not the same as set by the session handler cookie, and so the session handler cookie was not overwritten. This behaviour depends on host configuration... See, you introduce a $path variable in your patch, which is not set, and you don't care about the cookie domain... These were the main problems with the previous aproach, and this is why the setcookie() was removed. You should deal directly with the session ini settings! So please ini_set() the session cookie lifetime, if .htaccess is not enough for you, and let the session handler set the proper cookie. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 15:59 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user-module-session-2.patch (8.89 KB) Getting the sysadmin to tweek the .htaccess or php.ini is a tedious thing. If we can provide a better interface for them to do this, then it is better. Every time PHP gets upgraded by my hosting company or move machines, things do not work. With this patch, the sysadmin can set how long sessions are valid for. This version of the patch still overrides the session cookie, but uses the correct path. I am seeing reluctance to putting this in CVS, based on 'yet another option' objection, or it being a cookie. While I can sympathise with the objections, and see their point of view, I do not see another solution being proposed to those who asked for this feature to be brought back. See for example comments 46, 49, and 54. Taking away a feature is not a good thing. I would rather have had this be an end user settable option (a global default for the site, and a per user settable option). Until the feature is back with a technical solution that is acceptable to the powers that be, users can use this patch for CVS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 16:14 : Goba kbahey, please, what is the problem with setting the ini setting with ini_set() runtime? It would work without fiddling with the $path and $domain... Also note that your patch contains a lot of unrelated changes... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 17:06 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user-module-session-3.patch (2.04 KB) Sorry. The patch was for a lot of things by mistake. Here is the patch only for user.module. As for ini_set(), I can do: ini_set ("session.cookie_lifetime", number_of_seconds); But again, number_of_seconds has to be stored in a varaible, which will be another option. Will we get the objection "no more options" again? However, as I understand it, ini_set() has to be called before session_start() which is the first thing in includes/session.inc. Can variable_get() be called that early in Drupal life span to get the stored value? On a related note, why don't we have the following defaults set in conf.php, so regardless of .htaccess or php.ini, we ensure they are set in Drupal no matter what? ini_set ("session.cache_expire", 200000); ini_set ("session.gc_maxlifetime", 200000); ini_set ("session.auto_start", 0); ini_set ("session.save_handler", "user"); ini_set ("session.cache_limiter", "none"); ini_set ("session.use_trans_sid", 0); ini_set ("session.use_cookies", 1); ini_set ("session.use_only_cookies", 1); This also has the advantage that every domain in a multi-domain installation can have their own settings, if needed, instead of just one .htaccess. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 23:15 : Abalieno Excuse me, I'm one of the less experienced user of Drupal out there. This problem was HUGE for me because my installation, by default, remembered the sessions only for 20 minutes, then forcing me to relog. I've asked on the mailing list, I had peoples trying to register at my site to figure it out, I asked in other mailing lists. Nothing. At the end I discovered that it wasn't Drupal but a variable into php.ini (session.gc_maxlifetime). Noone was able to point me in the right direction. The last message I received from Mark Quinn is: "As for your PHP session issue, you may want to try and take it up with your hosting service, or wait until drupal properly resolves the issue with an application-managed cookie; I've not yet seen any discussion patches come through on this, myself. Maybe the Usual Suspects may have a better idea of whether someone is working on this part of the code, at present." At the end I was able to fix this by changing the php.ini. But it was a pain. I don't know from where comes the 'design choice' of 'not another setting'. This is a *basic* feature that on EVERY other engine can be set in the option. What is better? Something that you can notice easily in a configuration page or something that was set by someone else and there's no other way to change than to hack it yourself because the engine isn't flexible? "This a (very) advanced feature, that will never have to be changed on a site." No, this is a BASIC feature on EVERY engine. In general the users of a site need to set this by themselves, some want to be anonymous, some want to log it just once and forget, some want to log in once and remain logged forever. Not only this should be an option, but this should be also defined, by default, in the permissions panel. So that each member can set the cookie in the preferred way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 13, 2005 - 00:47 : kbahey This is exactly what I mean: we removed a feature and did not provide a replacement. My attempt to reintroduce the feature, admittedly having some drawbacks, was dimissed with no alternative provided. Can we discuss the alternatives, and implement a solution before 4.6 is out? -- View: http://drupal.org/node/2974 Edit: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/2974

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[drupal-devel] Drupal donors
by Chris Johnson 13 Feb '05

13 Feb '05

Just noticed the Drupal donors list thanks to the Drupal quickies posting. Is there any chance the Paypal e-amil link to Drupal account could use something other than identical e-mail entries? Some of us (maybe only me?) use a different e-mail address for Paypal and for Drupal (and/or for lots of other things -- for privacy, for spam filtering, etc). Just a trivial request. -- Chris Johnson

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[drupal-devel] Committing patch against CVS for DRUPAL-4-5 branch -- what did I do wrong?
by Scott Courtney 13 Feb '05

13 Feb '05

Good morning! A couple of days ago, I committed a one-line bug fix to the "weblink" module in CVS, with the DRUPAL-4-5 branch tag. I'm pretty sure it was committed successfully, because I see it here: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/weblink/?only_wi… But it somehow didn't propagate to the main download version for Drupal 4.5, and doesn't show up here: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/weblink/ What did I do wrong? Scott -- -----------------------+------------------------------------------------------ Scott Courtney | "I don't mind Microsoft making money. I mind them scott(a)4th.com | having a bad operating system." -- Linus Torvalds http://4th.com/ | ("The Rebel Code," NY Times, 21 February 1999) | PGP Public Key at http://4th.com/keys/scott.pubkey

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[drupal-devel] [feature] "remember me" doesn't work
by kbahey 13 Feb '05

13 Feb '05

Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: user.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: kbahey Reported by: marco Updated by: kbahey Status: patch This is exactly what I mean: we removed a feature and did not provide a replacement. My attempt to reintroduce the feature, admittedly having some drawbacks, was dimissed with no alternative provided. Can we discuss the alternatives, and implement a solution before 4.6 is out? kbahey Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2003 - 08:37 : marco "remember me" checkbox in the login box doesn't work; even if the checkbox is left unchecked the user is NOT forgotten when he quits the browser. Try logging in w/o "remember me", then quit the browser and open it again: you should be still logged in. What happens: when you login w/o checkbox user.module outputs a cookie with lifetime = 0 ("until session ends"); but user.module calls session_start() at the beginning, which outputs a cookie too, with the lifetime specified in .htaccess; and session_start() outputs this cookie always, so on the next page the cookie from user_login() will be overwritten. I run Mozilla 1.4; I can replicate with Drupal 4.0 and Drupal 4.2 on PHP 4.3.3, and I can replicate this on drupal.org which also runs PHP 4.3.3; OTOH I can't replicate on a site running Drupal 4.2 with PHP 4.2.2, which may mean session_start() changed with PHP 4.3.x; I looked in the changelog of PHP but couldn't find anything. I didn't have any report about this before upgrading to PHP 4.3.3, which also seems to strengthen the hypothesis of a changed behaviour in PHP. Another test I did also showed that with PHP 4.2.2 no cookie is printed by session_start() if a session cookie is found, while it is always printed in PHP 4.3.3; I double checked the configurations and didn't find anything which may cause this. If you want to investigate this, I suggest you to use Mozilla and Live HTTP Headers plugin. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 10, 2003 - 19:37 : moshe weitzman Can anyone confirm this? Also, how to fix? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 12:45 : axel(a)debian.linuxrulez.ru I agree it for Mozilla 1.0. On my site running on FreeBSD 4.7, PHP/4.3.0, Drupal CVS (Oct 3) this function also don't work. Though, with Galeon 1.2.5 cookie works ok. On localhost (Debian GNU/Linux 3.0, PHP 4.1.2, same Drupal cvs version) it works ok with Mozilla & Galeon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 13:34 : al The original bug report is surely due to Drupal needing to unset the cookie that it originally stored? To fix this bug, we therefore need a check on the user login/validation stage which forcibly unsets the cookie if you don't do "remember me". I suspect Axel's problems with one of his sites and not the other are due to him blocking a cookie originally and having that site on his Mozilla's list of sites to ban cookies from, or similar. Axel - if you are genuinely having issues with remember me not working at all (and not the fault originally described in this report by Ax) then please open a different bug report. Please make sure it's a genuine problem first - i.e. clear your blocked cookies sites list in Mozilla. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 18:24 : axel(a)debian.linuxrulez.ru Well. I don't sure what is a bug, therefore first post the question about it to forum [1]. Answer to that question point me to this bug report. Already several users of my site [2] report me about problem with "remember me" (I don't know which browsers they use). And there are not any blocked sites in my Mozilla cookies list - from site I receive only cookie PHPSESSID that expire time shows "at end of session". [1] http://drupal.org/node/view/3601 [2] http://debian.linuxrulez.ru ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 17, 2003 - 15:36 : dmo Expect "remember me" problems for users of Internet Explorer 6. Depending on the privacy settings, IE6 may automatically expire all cookies at the end of the browser session if your site doesn't have a compact P3P policy. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpriv/htm… and http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/10/04/p3p.html for further details. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 17, 2003 - 21:53 : moshe weitzman since noone can reproduce this, i am marking as 'by design' ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 02:41 : junyoung This is not a IE6 specific problem. I have seen the same symptom with IE5.5/6.0, Opera 7.0/7.1, and Konqueror 3.1.x so far. FWIW, my blog site is running with Drupal 4.2.0 + PHP 4.3.3. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 09:06 : remco(a)rc6.org Same problem on http://rc6.org, though the other way around. No matter what I do, my session will time out eventually. Tested using Opera 7.x, IE, Mozilla and Epiphany. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 10:00 : moshe weitzman reopening this case. i confirm the behavior that marco describes using rc6.org and drupal.org. i find it easiest to just turn cookie prompting on in order to watch what is happenning. what i am seeing, like marco described, is that our 'permanent cookie' which is supposed to last for a year is being overwritten in the next request with a standard session cookie that expires in the time frame specified in .htaccess. for drupal.org, standard sesson cookies last 1 month whereas the permanent cookie lasts for a year. i don't know how to fix this from within drupal. the cookie that we lay down for 'remember me' is working fine. the problem is the later overwrite which is caused by PHP's session handing, not drupal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 26, 2003 - 07:35 : moshe weitzman To make matters more complicated, I cannot reproduce this using PHP as an ISAPI module on IIS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 26, 2003 - 14:07 : Dries Maybe we can set a "remember" bit in the session table and periodically wipe users who don't have the "remember"-bit set. The wiping part could be added to sess_gc() ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 3, 2003 - 20:30 : joshk I have this problem w/musicforamerica.org The really maddening thing is that I have another install of drupal 4.3 on the same webserver and it works just fine. If the problem is with drupal's cookie being overwritten by a PHP session cookie, can this be fixed by giving the cookies different names? Sounds too simple to be the solution... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2003 - 11:48 : ykoehler http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.session-set-cookie-params.php Even though drupal is sending a cookie, it should always set this PHP parameter so that the session_start() call will use the same value, or not send any cookie at all by itself and let session_start() do it with, again, a call to this function to set the correct parameter. The reason why you don't get the same on a site basis is probably due to the different php.ini used for those sites as the default depends on the installation and not drupal which is probably why only some get the bug if there's such a thing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 30, 2003 - 15:50 : paul(a)murphymaphia.com I am having the opposite problem. Even if I check the "remember me" box my session ends when the browser closes and I'm forced to log in the next time I return to the site. No cookie is EVER set by my site. http://www.murphymaphia.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2004 - 12:31 : mathias Charles Miller has written a persistent login cookie best practices [3] i feel is worth reading. [3] http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/01/19/persistent_login_cookie_best_practi… ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 11, 2004 - 13:20 : paul(a)murphymaphia.com Has any progress been made on this? I have spent a lot of time in the code and can't manage to track this problem down. If anyone has any ideas, thoughts, etc to share, post them here so we can get this solved. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2004 - 00:07 : dmjossel I have this problem (remember me feature not working) in Drupal 4.3.x on PHP 4.3.2. I do NOT have it on Drupal 4.2 on PHP 4.3.2, in exactly the same environment. So perhaps sessions have changed in PHP 4.3.x, but this still didn't break Drupal 4.2, only 4.3.x. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 26, 2004 - 08:47 : moshe weitzman Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/_4drupal (5.3 KB) Here is a patch which attempts to resolve this problem. I took Josh's suggestion - just rename the permanent cookie so it get overwritten by the PHP session cookie. So this patch names our permanent cookie 'remember_me'. The value of this cookie is the current sessionID. This cookie is checked in sess_read(). It is set just as before, in user_login(). I refactored sess_read() a bit for cleaner flow. It uses a new helper function called sess_construct_user(). Feedback welcome. Since not everyone experienced a problem with remember me, I'm particlarly interested in feedback from those who did. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2004 - 05:43 : dmjossel No observable effect. Users who click "remember me" are still logged out after a period of inactivity or a browser restart, as is true in 4.3.2 (but not true in 4.2 on the same machine). Just out of curiosity I made similar changes in a copy of 4.3.2, renaming the cookie-- also with no effect. What *is* odd is that I used to see this problem using Drupal.org itself. But I seem now to have been logged in for quite awhile (several days) without having to reauthenticate, despite long periods of inactivity and browser restarts. Has some change other than this patch been made to CVS running on the live site? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2004 - 06:21 : dmjossel One more follow up: the patch re-enables the "remember me" button on logon and the preferences for the user.module, but not the "logout" button in the user info block. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 6, 2004 - 11:33 : moshe weitzman The logout link never left, so naturally this patch does not re-instate it. By "user-info" block, i'm guessing that you mean the 'Navigation' block which holds the menu(). Drupal.org issues session cookies for a month so you can remain logged in for a long time. Anyone else have feedback on this patch. It is working for me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 6, 2004 - 12:01 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Your patch works perfectly for me. I tested with three browsers (from Linux): Mozilla Firefox, Konquerer, Internet Explorer (via Wine) I did the following with each: 1) with latest CVS installation, I log in then restart my browser. I have to relogin. 2) I applied your patch to my CVS installation. 3) I logged in w/o checking "remember me". I then restart my browser, and I'm not logged in. 4) I logged in w/ "remember me" checked. I restart my browser, and I'm still logged in. 5) I logged in w/ "remember me" checked. I click logout, then restart my browser. I have to login again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 8, 2004 - 20:09 : Brian(a)brianpuccio.net Using weitzmann's patch works for me. I had no problem when running 4.3.0, 4.3.1, or 4.3.2 on my site, but adding 4.4.0 I had to log in each time. Applying the patch to my (next to stock, but ever so slightly modified) install of 4.4.0 fixes the problem and I am remembered across browser tab closings, browser closings and system restarts. Thank you greatly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2004 - 12:18 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/session.inc.patch (651 bytes) I believe there is a small bug in weitzman's patch. I've been running with it applied on KernelTrap.org for some time, with much positive feedback from users. However, I noticed that occasionally I become a phantom surfer -- I'm logged in and accessing pages, but I don't show up in the "Who's online" block. I suspect the online guests number is low, too. After a little digging, I came up with the attached simple patch. I have yet to confirm if it solves the phantom surfer problem. Essentially, when we log in with a cookie we also update the sessions table timestamp. To use, first apply weitzman's patch (earlier in this thread), then apply this one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2004 - 16:28 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/session.inc_0.patch (584 bytes) My earlier patch didn't work. It was redundant with sess_write(), and added nothing new. Hence, it didn't fix the "phantom user" that I've been experiencing. Now, however, I believe I fully understand what's going wrong. Essentially what's happening is a user is being loaded via the remember_me cookie, but their session id is different. Thus, the db_query in sess_write() fails to update a user session in the database. This patch detects that failure and acts accordingly by creating a new entry. This patch applies against drupal 4.4 with weitzman's patch [4] applied. [4] http://drupal.org/files/issues/_4drupal ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 15, 2004 - 02:39 : mabster Still seems to be a bit flakey. I get logged out every once in a while at work for some reason (during the day). And every time I move from my work to my home machines (or vice versa) I need to login again. Does the cookie base itself on my IP address or something? Could it be that because I'm switching between two different PCs that it can't remember my session details? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2004 - 21:19 : dmjossel I've upgraded the site Rampancy.net to Drupal 4.4 and applied Weitzman's patch. The behavior I'm seeing now I don't completely understand. Logging in to the site, you can quit the browser and stay logged in. But after a period of inactivity, somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes, the session expires and you have to log in again. I don't see this behavior on drupal.org. php.ini on the server is set for session cookies to last for 30 days. Drupal, by default, is supposed to give cookies that last 1 year. Is there anything else I should be looking at? Apparently some admins have this problem and others don't. Server info: FreeBSD synfibers.com 4.7-RELEASE-p22 FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p22 #29: Tu i386 Apache/1.3.27 OpenSSL/0.9.7 (Unix) PHP/4.3.4 registered session save handlers are files and user. (local value is user) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 21, 2004 - 22:20 : mabster Yes, dmjossel's description matches the behaviour on my site (www.madprops.org) We're a hosted site, so I'm not exactly sure of the server's details. I'm fairly certain it's Windows2003. Definitely a Windows flavour, anyway, which means that this problem (with the patch applied) is not restricted to Linux. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 05:26 : dmjossel Apologies first for using this like a forum... mabster, upload a file to the server with the phpinfo(); in it (inside PHP tags of course). What values does it show for cookie-related functions? For session_save_handler? Perhaps there is a common element in server configuration in these two cases, despite the different operating systems. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 05:48 : mabster session.save_handler = files session.cookie_domain = no value session.cookie_lifetime = 0 session.cookie_path = / session.use_cookies = On session.use_only_cookie = Off Other info (at least until someone tells me that publishing this info is dangerous and I remove the file) here [5]. [5] http://www.madprops.org/info.php ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 11:12 : dmjossel Suggestions... try setting session.use_only_cookies =1 either in php.ini, or if you don't have access to that, by using ini_set in drupal's php.conf and see if that has any effect. Next change Drupal's site configuration for the user module, and toggle whether you allow users to choose whether or not to be logged out (this produces the "remember me" cookie if you've installed weitzman's patch) or choose "users are never logged out". Neither of these seem to help here, but perhaps they'd help you. I noticed that until I set my browser to "accept all cookies automatically" and set session.use_only_cookies =1, I was getting the PHPSESSID cookie, but not the remember_me cookie. Now I get them both... but still logged out after 30 minutes of idle time, no matter what. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 11:26 : moshe weitzman those are not the session values that ship with drupal (see .htaccess file). for example, session_save_handler has to be 'user'. otherwise, you are not using drupal's session table and your 'remember me' will fail. since you are using IIS, you have to set your php.ini with values like those found in .htaccess. .htaccess files are only respected by Apache (and even then, not always. depends on your web host). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 19:39 : mabster Just out of interest, weitzman: How does drupal.org's 'remember me' work? I installed a cookie inspector on my machine at work, and didn't see any 'remember me' values in drupal.org's cookie. Does it use a different system? I will see what our host can do about changing the php.ini values. Since there are many sites hosted on that one box, it'll be a long shot to get them to change it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2004 - 12:21 : dmjossel Try tweaking the value of session.gc_maxlifetime either in the .htaccess file or in php.ini. The default value in the .htaccess file seems to be 1440 seconds-- or 24 minutes, almost exactly the amount of time my sessions were lasting before being forced to log in again. I've increased this value, and now I'm seeing the remember_me cookie stay with the same value, while the PHPSESSID cookie is constantly being replaced by a new one-- but I don't have to log in again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2004 - 20:23 : dmjossel Well, it's the next morning here, and I'm still logged in at Rampancy.net and the other Drupal 4.3 sites that are hosted on the same machine. I think at least this might be a workaround for those who have this problem and Weitzman's patch alone doesn't solve it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 25, 2004 - 20:02 : dmjossel After a longer period of inactivity (equal to the value of session.gc_maxlifetime) the sessions ALWAYS seem to log the user out, regardless of the remember_me cookie value, the PHPSESSID value, or the configuration settings for the user module. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 6, 2004 - 06:34 : Robert L I can confirm #41, have tried changing some of the sessions vars in .htaccess, but this did not solve the problem. Sessions are destroyed after some time of browser inactivity (some hours). At the browser side things look oke, it happens with Mozilla and IE. Have not tested the patch yet, I am not using the remember me cookie option, and this looks another unrelated (?) problem to me. I use PHP 4.3.6 with Apache 2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 5, 2004 - 21:41 : Anonymous I fixed it very simply by adding the line: session_set_cookie_params(0, "/dev/null"); immediately before the call to session_start(). This causes the cookie that PHP sets to only apply to the path "/dev/null" which, of course, doesn't exist. Thus, the cookie that Drupal's setcookie() call sets, with a path of "/", is held on to by the browser, and Drupal goes back to its old behaviour. It's a hack, but it works. A better long-term solution would be for Drupal to use the session_set_cookie_params() call to set the expiry time, rather than its own call to setcookie(). Tim Bates ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 6, 2004 - 12:37 : bertboerland(a)www.drop.org I am sorry to say, that adding a line like that in user.module doesnt do the trick for me (running php 4.2.3/drupal 4.). Can it be that this might work under certain conditions which differ from mine? Anyone else still working on this *critical* bug? I am not changing the status but I think it should still read "active"? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 8, 2004 - 03:58 : bertboerland(a)www.drop.org never mind my previous remark... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 9, 2004 - 20:53 : moshe weitzman perhaps someone will take interest in this bug. i hope not to release another drupal version without 'remember me'. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 13, 2004 - 16:49 : seanr This used to work for me. Now I hear it's been completely disabled. Why? I'd rather have a feature that works for most users and not some than not have the feature at all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2004 - 11:39 : Anonymous We dropped the whole 'remember me' posiibility in drupal 4.5. If it is - strategically seen - a good move, is another story, but now marked this as "Won't fix". ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2004 - 15:35 : moshe weitzman umm - thanks 'anonymous'. this is a valid feature request, even if it isn't a valid bug anymore. marking as such. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 13, 2004 - 22:45 : jasper this is a bug actually. If you don't think so, you really aren't thinking about user experience. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 19, 2004 - 13:48 : jasper I am having this problem with 4.5. After you login, the cookie that is set to expire in a month is overwritten by a session cookie, so remember me doesn;t work. I "fixed" this by hacking user.module to set its cookie to a non-existant path. Maybe that will mess something up. I notice that drupal.org overcomes this by setting the initial cookie to "host: drupal.org" and the second cookie to "domain: .drupal.org" Where is this documented? How do you do that? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 11:43 : Anonymous I was having the same problem. I changed user.module's call to setcookie() so that the cookie would expire after 2000000 seconds. That fixed it for me. Now I don't have to login every time I visit. I hope I didn't break anything else, though. setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), FALSE, $path); becomes: setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), time() + 2000000, $path); ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 22:03 : dtan Ya, suddenly noticed that I had to login everytime . . . not a huge deal, but is a bit of a pain. Should this be a configurable option for the site?? Obviously from the length of this issue, people feel it is a useful feature. . . dtan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 26, 2004 - 23:32 : tvst I WANT THIS FEATURE BACK! Sure, there were problems with it -- but let's fix the bug instead of killing a nice feature. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 3, 2004 - 18:02 : Goba Dries just committed a patch, which removes that superflous cookie setting, so session time in upcoming versions will be determined by the PHP settings, and short lived cookies will not be set. Until new versions are released, it is completely safe to remove the setcookie line in user.module (and the preg line above that), and it solves the problem of users needing to login everytime. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 5, 2004 - 01:02 : Anonymous wow. thanks. this was breaking my sites ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 12:06 : kbahey This way, the PHP settings are the ones that determine the session length. Wouldn't it be better to have an admin option that allows users to set their session length? with a global default for sessions (e.g. 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, ...etc.) If this option is enabled, then it can be overriden by the user individually too. This is a better scheme than having a forced global setting outside Drupal, on the PHP level for all users. What do others think? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 13:50 : kbahey Reviving this issue. The session length should be an option that the administrator, or the end user can set. We should not rely on the PHP settings alone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 11, 2005 - 19:54 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/use-module-session.patch (1.92 KB) I feel that removing the setcookie() call was not the right thing to do. Session length should not be relegated to .htaccess or php.ini, but should be an application feature. I am attaching a patch that reinstates this functionality via a configuration option. The sysadmin determines how long visitors should have their session for, and a cookie is set for them with the appropriate lifetime. Please look at this rationally and objectively and do not dismiss it offhand because 'too many options are bad'. I had to go through php.ini and .htaccess hell for the last few months because my hosting company has implemented PHP suExec (hence .htaccess cannot set php parameters), then moved to another machine with .htaccess reinstated. This also allows people (like me) who serve several domains from a single Drupal installation to set the session length differently for different domains. Moreover, the Drupal end user should not have to go through fiddling with .htaccess values to get this functionality back. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 06:51 : Bèr Kessels -1 for yet another config option. Thisis a (very) advanced feuature, that will never have to be changed on a site. Therefore we need to give it a good default, and if people really want to chage it, those few can do so in conf.php. Bèr ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 08:57 : Goba Please *do not use setcookie()* to overwrite the session cookie! The problem before was that $path and $domain were not the same as set by the session handler cookie, and so the session handler cookie was not overwritten. This behaviour depends on host configuration... See, you introduce a $path variable in your patch, which is not set, and you don't care about the cookie domain... These were the main problems with the previous aproach, and this is why the setcookie() was removed. You should deal directly with the session ini settings! So please ini_set() the session cookie lifetime, if .htaccess is not enough for you, and let the session handler set the proper cookie. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 09:59 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user-module-session-2.patch (8.89 KB) Getting the sysadmin to tweek the .htaccess or php.ini is a tedious thing. If we can provide a better interface for them to do this, then it is better. Every time PHP gets upgraded by my hosting company or move machines, things do not work. With this patch, the sysadmin can set how long sessions are valid for. This version of the patch still overrides the session cookie, but uses the correct path. I am seeing reluctance to putting this in CVS, based on 'yet another option' objection, or it being a cookie. While I can sympathise with the objections, and see their point of view, I do not see another solution being proposed to those who asked for this feature to be brought back. See for example comments 46, 49, and 54. Taking away a feature is not a good thing. I would rather have had this be an end user settable option (a global default for the site, and a per user settable option). Until the feature is back with a technical solution that is acceptable to the powers that be, users can use this patch for CVS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 10:14 : Goba kbahey, please, what is the problem with setting the ini setting with ini_set() runtime? It would work without fiddling with the $path and $domain... Also note that your patch contains a lot of unrelated changes... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 11:06 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user-module-session-3.patch (2.04 KB) Sorry. The patch was for a lot of things by mistake. Here is the patch only for user.module. As for ini_set(), I can do: ini_set ("session.cookie_lifetime", number_of_seconds); But again, number_of_seconds has to be stored in a varaible, which will be another option. Will we get the objection "no more options" again? However, as I understand it, ini_set() has to be called before session_start() which is the first thing in includes/session.inc. Can variable_get() be called that early in Drupal life span to get the stored value? On a related note, why don't we have the following defaults set in conf.php, so regardless of .htaccess or php.ini, we ensure they are set in Drupal no matter what? ini_set ("session.cache_expire", 200000); ini_set ("session.gc_maxlifetime", 200000); ini_set ("session.auto_start", 0); ini_set ("session.save_handler", "user"); ini_set ("session.cache_limiter", "none"); ini_set ("session.use_trans_sid", 0); ini_set ("session.use_cookies", 1); ini_set ("session.use_only_cookies", 1); This also has the advantage that every domain in a multi-domain installation can have their own settings, if needed, instead of just one .htaccess. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 17:15 : Abalieno Excuse me, I'm one of the less experienced user of Drupal out there. This problem was HUGE for me because my installation, by default, remembered the sessions only for 20 minutes, then forcing me to relog. I've asked on the mailing list, I had peoples trying to register at my site to figure it out, I asked in other mailing lists. Nothing. At the end I discovered that it wasn't Drupal but a variable into php.ini (session.gc_maxlifetime). Noone was able to point me in the right direction. The last message I received from Mark Quinn is: "As for your PHP session issue, you may want to try and take it up with your hosting service, or wait until drupal properly resolves the issue with an application-managed cookie; I've not yet seen any discussion patches come through on this, myself. Maybe the Usual Suspects may have a better idea of whether someone is working on this part of the code, at present." At the end I was able to fix this by changing the php.ini. But it was a pain. I don't know from where comes the 'design choice' of 'not another setting'. This is a *basic* feature that on EVERY other engine can be set in the option. What is better? Something that you can notice easily in a configuration page or something that was set by someone else and there's no other way to change than to hack it yourself because the engine isn't flexible? "This a (very) advanced feature, that will never have to be changed on a site." No, this is a BASIC feature on EVERY engine. In general the users of a site need to set this by themselves, some want to be anonymous, some want to log it just once and forget, some want to log in once and remain logged forever. Not only this should be an option, but this should be also defined, by default, in the permissions panel. So that each member can set the cookie in the preferred way. -- View: http://drupal.org/node/2974 Edit: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/2974

1 0

[drupal-devel] [feature] "remember me" doesn't work
by Abalieno 12 Feb '05

12 Feb '05

Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: user.module Category: feature requests Priority: normal Assigned to: kbahey Reported by: marco Updated by: Abalieno Status: patch Excuse me, I'm one of the less experienced user of Drupal out there. This problem was HUGE for me because my installation, by default, remembered the sessions only for 20 minutes, then forcing me to relog. I've asked on the mailing list, I had peoples trying to register at my site to figure it out, I asked in other mailing lists. Nothing. At the end I discovered that it wasn't Drupal but a variable into php.ini (session.gc_maxlifetime). Noone was able to point me in the right direction. The last message I received from Mark Quinn is: "As for your PHP session issue, you may want to try and take it up with your hosting service, or wait until drupal properly resolves the issue with an application-managed cookie; I've not yet seen any discussion patches come through on this, myself. Maybe the Usual Suspects may have a better idea of whether someone is working on this part of the code, at present." At the end I was able to fix this by changing the php.ini. But it was a pain. I don't know from where comes the 'design choice' of 'not another setting'. This is a *basic* feature that on EVERY other engine can be set in the option. What is better? Something that you can notice easily in a configuration page or something that was set by someone else and there's no other way to change than to hack it yourself because the engine isn't flexible? "This a (very) advanced feature, that will never have to be changed on a site." No, this is a BASIC feature on EVERY engine. In general the users of a site need to set this by themselves, some want to be anonymous, some want to log it just once and forget, some want to log in once and remain logged forever. Not only this should be an option, but this should be also defined, by default, in the permissions panel. So that each member can set the cookie in the preferred way. Abalieno Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2003 - 13:37 : marco "remember me" checkbox in the login box doesn't work; even if the checkbox is left unchecked the user is NOT forgotten when he quits the browser. Try logging in w/o "remember me", then quit the browser and open it again: you should be still logged in. What happens: when you login w/o checkbox user.module outputs a cookie with lifetime = 0 ("until session ends"); but user.module calls session_start() at the beginning, which outputs a cookie too, with the lifetime specified in .htaccess; and session_start() outputs this cookie always, so on the next page the cookie from user_login() will be overwritten. I run Mozilla 1.4; I can replicate with Drupal 4.0 and Drupal 4.2 on PHP 4.3.3, and I can replicate this on drupal.org which also runs PHP 4.3.3; OTOH I can't replicate on a site running Drupal 4.2 with PHP 4.2.2, which may mean session_start() changed with PHP 4.3.x; I looked in the changelog of PHP but couldn't find anything. I didn't have any report about this before upgrading to PHP 4.3.3, which also seems to strengthen the hypothesis of a changed behaviour in PHP. Another test I did also showed that with PHP 4.2.2 no cookie is printed by session_start() if a session cookie is found, while it is always printed in PHP 4.3.3; I double checked the configurations and didn't find anything which may cause this. If you want to investigate this, I suggest you to use Mozilla and Live HTTP Headers plugin. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 11, 2003 - 00:37 : moshe weitzman Can anyone confirm this? Also, how to fix? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 17:45 : axel(a)debian.linuxrulez.ru I agree it for Mozilla 1.0. On my site running on FreeBSD 4.7, PHP/4.3.0, Drupal CVS (Oct 3) this function also don't work. Though, with Galeon 1.2.5 cookie works ok. On localhost (Debian GNU/Linux 3.0, PHP 4.1.2, same Drupal cvs version) it works ok with Mozilla & Galeon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 18:34 : al The original bug report is surely due to Drupal needing to unset the cookie that it originally stored? To fix this bug, we therefore need a check on the user login/validation stage which forcibly unsets the cookie if you don't do "remember me". I suspect Axel's problems with one of his sites and not the other are due to him blocking a cookie originally and having that site on his Mozilla's list of sites to ban cookies from, or similar. Axel - if you are genuinely having issues with remember me not working at all (and not the fault originally described in this report by Ax) then please open a different bug report. Please make sure it's a genuine problem first - i.e. clear your blocked cookies sites list in Mozilla. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 12, 2003 - 23:24 : axel(a)debian.linuxrulez.ru Well. I don't sure what is a bug, therefore first post the question about it to forum [1]. Answer to that question point me to this bug report. Already several users of my site [2] report me about problem with "remember me" (I don't know which browsers they use). And there are not any blocked sites in my Mozilla cookies list - from site I receive only cookie PHPSESSID that expire time shows "at end of session". [1] http://drupal.org/node/view/3601 [2] http://debian.linuxrulez.ru ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 17, 2003 - 20:36 : dmo Expect "remember me" problems for users of Internet Explorer 6. Depending on the privacy settings, IE6 may automatically expire all cookies at the end of the browser session if your site doesn't have a compact P3P policy. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpriv/htm… and http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/10/04/p3p.html for further details. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 18, 2003 - 02:53 : moshe weitzman since noone can reproduce this, i am marking as 'by design' ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 07:41 : junyoung This is not a IE6 specific problem. I have seen the same symptom with IE5.5/6.0, Opera 7.0/7.1, and Konqueror 3.1.x so far. FWIW, my blog site is running with Drupal 4.2.0 + PHP 4.3.3. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 14:06 : remco(a)rc6.org Same problem on http://rc6.org, though the other way around. No matter what I do, my session will time out eventually. Tested using Opera 7.x, IE, Mozilla and Epiphany. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 25, 2003 - 15:00 : moshe weitzman reopening this case. i confirm the behavior that marco describes using rc6.org and drupal.org. i find it easiest to just turn cookie prompting on in order to watch what is happenning. what i am seeing, like marco described, is that our 'permanent cookie' which is supposed to last for a year is being overwritten in the next request with a standard session cookie that expires in the time frame specified in .htaccess. for drupal.org, standard sesson cookies last 1 month whereas the permanent cookie lasts for a year. i don't know how to fix this from within drupal. the cookie that we lay down for 'remember me' is working fine. the problem is the later overwrite which is caused by PHP's session handing, not drupal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 26, 2003 - 12:35 : moshe weitzman To make matters more complicated, I cannot reproduce this using PHP as an ISAPI module on IIS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 26, 2003 - 19:07 : Dries Maybe we can set a "remember" bit in the session table and periodically wipe users who don't have the "remember"-bit set. The wiping part could be added to sess_gc() ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 4, 2003 - 01:30 : joshk I have this problem w/musicforamerica.org The really maddening thing is that I have another install of drupal 4.3 on the same webserver and it works just fine. If the problem is with drupal's cookie being overwritten by a PHP session cookie, can this be fixed by giving the cookies different names? Sounds too simple to be the solution... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 12, 2003 - 16:48 : ykoehler http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.session-set-cookie-params.php Even though drupal is sending a cookie, it should always set this PHP parameter so that the session_start() call will use the same value, or not send any cookie at all by itself and let session_start() do it with, again, a call to this function to set the correct parameter. The reason why you don't get the same on a site basis is probably due to the different php.ini used for those sites as the default depends on the installation and not drupal which is probably why only some get the bug if there's such a thing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 30, 2003 - 20:50 : paul(a)murphymaphia.com I am having the opposite problem. Even if I check the "remember me" box my session ends when the browser closes and I'm forced to log in the next time I return to the site. No cookie is EVER set by my site. http://www.murphymaphia.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ January 20, 2004 - 17:31 : mathias Charles Miller has written a persistent login cookie best practices [3] i feel is worth reading. [3] http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/01/19/persistent_login_cookie_best_practi… ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 11, 2004 - 18:20 : paul(a)murphymaphia.com Has any progress been made on this? I have spent a lot of time in the code and can't manage to track this problem down. If anyone has any ideas, thoughts, etc to share, post them here so we can get this solved. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2004 - 05:07 : dmjossel I have this problem (remember me feature not working) in Drupal 4.3.x on PHP 4.3.2. I do NOT have it on Drupal 4.2 on PHP 4.3.2, in exactly the same environment. So perhaps sessions have changed in PHP 4.3.x, but this still didn't break Drupal 4.2, only 4.3.x. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 26, 2004 - 13:47 : moshe weitzman Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/_4drupal (5.3 KB) Here is a patch which attempts to resolve this problem. I took Josh's suggestion - just rename the permanent cookie so it get overwritten by the PHP session cookie. So this patch names our permanent cookie 'remember_me'. The value of this cookie is the current sessionID. This cookie is checked in sess_read(). It is set just as before, in user_login(). I refactored sess_read() a bit for cleaner flow. It uses a new helper function called sess_construct_user(). Feedback welcome. Since not everyone experienced a problem with remember me, I'm particlarly interested in feedback from those who did. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2004 - 10:43 : dmjossel No observable effect. Users who click "remember me" are still logged out after a period of inactivity or a browser restart, as is true in 4.3.2 (but not true in 4.2 on the same machine). Just out of curiosity I made similar changes in a copy of 4.3.2, renaming the cookie-- also with no effect. What *is* odd is that I used to see this problem using Drupal.org itself. But I seem now to have been logged in for quite awhile (several days) without having to reauthenticate, despite long periods of inactivity and browser restarts. Has some change other than this patch been made to CVS running on the live site? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 2, 2004 - 11:21 : dmjossel One more follow up: the patch re-enables the "remember me" button on logon and the preferences for the user.module, but not the "logout" button in the user info block. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 6, 2004 - 16:33 : moshe weitzman The logout link never left, so naturally this patch does not re-instate it. By "user-info" block, i'm guessing that you mean the 'Navigation' block which holds the menu(). Drupal.org issues session cookies for a month so you can remain logged in for a long time. Anyone else have feedback on this patch. It is working for me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 6, 2004 - 17:01 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Your patch works perfectly for me. I tested with three browsers (from Linux): Mozilla Firefox, Konquerer, Internet Explorer (via Wine) I did the following with each: 1) with latest CVS installation, I log in then restart my browser. I have to relogin. 2) I applied your patch to my CVS installation. 3) I logged in w/o checking "remember me". I then restart my browser, and I'm not logged in. 4) I logged in w/ "remember me" checked. I restart my browser, and I'm still logged in. 5) I logged in w/ "remember me" checked. I click logout, then restart my browser. I have to login again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 9, 2004 - 01:09 : Brian(a)brianpuccio.net Using weitzmann's patch works for me. I had no problem when running 4.3.0, 4.3.1, or 4.3.2 on my site, but adding 4.4.0 I had to log in each time. Applying the patch to my (next to stock, but ever so slightly modified) install of 4.4.0 fixes the problem and I am remembered across browser tab closings, browser closings and system restarts. Thank you greatly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2004 - 17:18 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/session.inc.patch (651 bytes) I believe there is a small bug in weitzman's patch. I've been running with it applied on KernelTrap.org for some time, with much positive feedback from users. However, I noticed that occasionally I become a phantom surfer -- I'm logged in and accessing pages, but I don't show up in the "Who's online" block. I suspect the online guests number is low, too. After a little digging, I came up with the attached simple patch. I have yet to confirm if it solves the phantom surfer problem. Essentially, when we log in with a cookie we also update the sessions table timestamp. To use, first apply weitzman's patch (earlier in this thread), then apply this one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 11, 2004 - 21:28 : Jeremy(a)kerneltrap.org Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/session.inc_0.patch (584 bytes) My earlier patch didn't work. It was redundant with sess_write(), and added nothing new. Hence, it didn't fix the "phantom user" that I've been experiencing. Now, however, I believe I fully understand what's going wrong. Essentially what's happening is a user is being loaded via the remember_me cookie, but their session id is different. Thus, the db_query in sess_write() fails to update a user session in the database. This patch detects that failure and acts accordingly by creating a new entry. This patch applies against drupal 4.4 with weitzman's patch [4] applied. [4] http://drupal.org/files/issues/_4drupal ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 15, 2004 - 07:39 : mabster Still seems to be a bit flakey. I get logged out every once in a while at work for some reason (during the day). And every time I move from my work to my home machines (or vice versa) I need to login again. Does the cookie base itself on my IP address or something? Could it be that because I'm switching between two different PCs that it can't remember my session details? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2004 - 02:19 : dmjossel I've upgraded the site Rampancy.net to Drupal 4.4 and applied Weitzman's patch. The behavior I'm seeing now I don't completely understand. Logging in to the site, you can quit the browser and stay logged in. But after a period of inactivity, somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes, the session expires and you have to log in again. I don't see this behavior on drupal.org. php.ini on the server is set for session cookies to last for 30 days. Drupal, by default, is supposed to give cookies that last 1 year. Is there anything else I should be looking at? Apparently some admins have this problem and others don't. Server info: FreeBSD synfibers.com 4.7-RELEASE-p22 FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p22 #29: Tu i386 Apache/1.3.27 OpenSSL/0.9.7 (Unix) PHP/4.3.4 registered session save handlers are files and user. (local value is user) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 22, 2004 - 03:20 : mabster Yes, dmjossel's description matches the behaviour on my site (www.madprops.org) We're a hosted site, so I'm not exactly sure of the server's details. I'm fairly certain it's Windows2003. Definitely a Windows flavour, anyway, which means that this problem (with the patch applied) is not restricted to Linux. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 10:26 : dmjossel Apologies first for using this like a forum... mabster, upload a file to the server with the phpinfo(); in it (inside PHP tags of course). What values does it show for cookie-related functions? For session_save_handler? Perhaps there is a common element in server configuration in these two cases, despite the different operating systems. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 10:48 : mabster session.save_handler = files session.cookie_domain = no value session.cookie_lifetime = 0 session.cookie_path = / session.use_cookies = On session.use_only_cookie = Off Other info (at least until someone tells me that publishing this info is dangerous and I remove the file) here [5]. [5] http://www.madprops.org/info.php ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 16:12 : dmjossel Suggestions... try setting session.use_only_cookies =1 either in php.ini, or if you don't have access to that, by using ini_set in drupal's php.conf and see if that has any effect. Next change Drupal's site configuration for the user module, and toggle whether you allow users to choose whether or not to be logged out (this produces the "remember me" cookie if you've installed weitzman's patch) or choose "users are never logged out". Neither of these seem to help here, but perhaps they'd help you. I noticed that until I set my browser to "accept all cookies automatically" and set session.use_only_cookies =1, I was getting the PHPSESSID cookie, but not the remember_me cookie. Now I get them both... but still logged out after 30 minutes of idle time, no matter what. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 23, 2004 - 16:26 : moshe weitzman those are not the session values that ship with drupal (see .htaccess file). for example, session_save_handler has to be 'user'. otherwise, you are not using drupal's session table and your 'remember me' will fail. since you are using IIS, you have to set your php.ini with values like those found in .htaccess. .htaccess files are only respected by Apache (and even then, not always. depends on your web host). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2004 - 00:39 : mabster Just out of interest, weitzman: How does drupal.org's 'remember me' work? I installed a cookie inspector on my machine at work, and didn't see any 'remember me' values in drupal.org's cookie. Does it use a different system? I will see what our host can do about changing the php.ini values. Since there are many sites hosted on that one box, it'll be a long shot to get them to change it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 24, 2004 - 17:21 : dmjossel Try tweaking the value of session.gc_maxlifetime either in the .htaccess file or in php.ini. The default value in the .htaccess file seems to be 1440 seconds-- or 24 minutes, almost exactly the amount of time my sessions were lasting before being forced to log in again. I've increased this value, and now I'm seeing the remember_me cookie stay with the same value, while the PHPSESSID cookie is constantly being replaced by a new one-- but I don't have to log in again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 25, 2004 - 01:23 : dmjossel Well, it's the next morning here, and I'm still logged in at Rampancy.net and the other Drupal 4.3 sites that are hosted on the same machine. I think at least this might be a workaround for those who have this problem and Weitzman's patch alone doesn't solve it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ April 26, 2004 - 01:02 : dmjossel After a longer period of inactivity (equal to the value of session.gc_maxlifetime) the sessions ALWAYS seem to log the user out, regardless of the remember_me cookie value, the PHPSESSID value, or the configuration settings for the user module. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 6, 2004 - 11:34 : Robert L I can confirm #41, have tried changing some of the sessions vars in .htaccess, but this did not solve the problem. Sessions are destroyed after some time of browser inactivity (some hours). At the browser side things look oke, it happens with Mozilla and IE. Have not tested the patch yet, I am not using the remember me cookie option, and this looks another unrelated (?) problem to me. I use PHP 4.3.6 with Apache 2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 6, 2004 - 02:41 : Anonymous I fixed it very simply by adding the line: session_set_cookie_params(0, "/dev/null"); immediately before the call to session_start(). This causes the cookie that PHP sets to only apply to the path "/dev/null" which, of course, doesn't exist. Thus, the cookie that Drupal's setcookie() call sets, with a path of "/", is held on to by the browser, and Drupal goes back to its old behaviour. It's a hack, but it works. A better long-term solution would be for Drupal to use the session_set_cookie_params() call to set the expiry time, rather than its own call to setcookie(). Tim Bates ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 6, 2004 - 17:37 : bertboerland(a)www.drop.org I am sorry to say, that adding a line like that in user.module doesnt do the trick for me (running php 4.2.3/drupal 4.). Can it be that this might work under certain conditions which differ from mine? Anyone else still working on this *critical* bug? I am not changing the status but I think it should still read "active"? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 8, 2004 - 08:58 : bertboerland(a)www.drop.org never mind my previous remark... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 10, 2004 - 01:53 : moshe weitzman perhaps someone will take interest in this bug. i hope not to release another drupal version without 'remember me'. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 13, 2004 - 21:49 : seanr This used to work for me. Now I hear it's been completely disabled. Why? I'd rather have a feature that works for most users and not some than not have the feature at all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2004 - 16:39 : Anonymous We dropped the whole 'remember me' posiibility in drupal 4.5. If it is - strategically seen - a good move, is another story, but now marked this as "Won't fix". ------------------------------------------------------------------------ September 22, 2004 - 20:35 : moshe weitzman umm - thanks 'anonymous'. this is a valid feature request, even if it isn't a valid bug anymore. marking as such. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 14, 2004 - 03:45 : jasper this is a bug actually. If you don't think so, you really aren't thinking about user experience. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 19, 2004 - 18:48 : jasper I am having this problem with 4.5. After you login, the cookie that is set to expire in a month is overwritten by a session cookie, so remember me doesn;t work. I "fixed" this by hacking user.module to set its cookie to a non-existant path. Maybe that will mess something up. I notice that drupal.org overcomes this by setting the initial cookie to "host: drupal.org" and the second cookie to "domain: .drupal.org" Where is this documented? How do you do that? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 21, 2004 - 16:43 : Anonymous I was having the same problem. I changed user.module's call to setcookie() so that the cookie would expire after 2000000 seconds. That fixed it for me. Now I don't have to login every time I visit. I hope I didn't break anything else, though. setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), FALSE, $path); becomes: setcookie(session_name(), session_id(), time() + 2000000, $path); ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 22, 2004 - 03:03 : dtan Ya, suddenly noticed that I had to login everytime . . . not a huge deal, but is a bit of a pain. Should this be a configurable option for the site?? Obviously from the length of this issue, people feel it is a useful feature. . . dtan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October 27, 2004 - 04:32 : tvst I WANT THIS FEATURE BACK! Sure, there were problems with it -- but let's fix the bug instead of killing a nice feature. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 3, 2004 - 23:02 : Goba Dries just committed a patch, which removes that superflous cookie setting, so session time in upcoming versions will be determined by the PHP settings, and short lived cookies will not be set. Until new versions are released, it is completely safe to remove the setcookie line in user.module (and the preg line above that), and it solves the problem of users needing to login everytime. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ November 5, 2004 - 06:02 : Anonymous wow. thanks. this was breaking my sites ------------------------------------------------------------------------ December 14, 2004 - 17:06 : kbahey This way, the PHP settings are the ones that determine the session length. Wouldn't it be better to have an admin option that allows users to set their session length? with a global default for sessions (e.g. 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, ...etc.) If this option is enabled, then it can be overriden by the user individually too. This is a better scheme than having a forced global setting outside Drupal, on the PHP level for all users. What do others think? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 3, 2005 - 18:50 : kbahey Reviving this issue. The session length should be an option that the administrator, or the end user can set. We should not rely on the PHP settings alone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 00:54 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/use-module-session.patch (1.92 KB) I feel that removing the setcookie() call was not the right thing to do. Session length should not be relegated to .htaccess or php.ini, but should be an application feature. I am attaching a patch that reinstates this functionality via a configuration option. The sysadmin determines how long visitors should have their session for, and a cookie is set for them with the appropriate lifetime. Please look at this rationally and objectively and do not dismiss it offhand because 'too many options are bad'. I had to go through php.ini and .htaccess hell for the last few months because my hosting company has implemented PHP suExec (hence .htaccess cannot set php parameters), then moved to another machine with .htaccess reinstated. This also allows people (like me) who serve several domains from a single Drupal installation to set the session length differently for different domains. Moreover, the Drupal end user should not have to go through fiddling with .htaccess values to get this functionality back. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 11:51 : Bèr Kessels -1 for yet another config option. Thisis a (very) advanced feuature, that will never have to be changed on a site. Therefore we need to give it a good default, and if people really want to chage it, those few can do so in conf.php. Bèr ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 13:57 : Goba Please *do not use setcookie()* to overwrite the session cookie! The problem before was that $path and $domain were not the same as set by the session handler cookie, and so the session handler cookie was not overwritten. This behaviour depends on host configuration... See, you introduce a $path variable in your patch, which is not set, and you don't care about the cookie domain... These were the main problems with the previous aproach, and this is why the setcookie() was removed. You should deal directly with the session ini settings! So please ini_set() the session cookie lifetime, if .htaccess is not enough for you, and let the session handler set the proper cookie. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 14:59 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user-module-session-2.patch (8.89 KB) Getting the sysadmin to tweek the .htaccess or php.ini is a tedious thing. If we can provide a better interface for them to do this, then it is better. Every time PHP gets upgraded by my hosting company or move machines, things do not work. With this patch, the sysadmin can set how long sessions are valid for. This version of the patch still overrides the session cookie, but uses the correct path. I am seeing reluctance to putting this in CVS, based on 'yet another option' objection, or it being a cookie. While I can sympathise with the objections, and see their point of view, I do not see another solution being proposed to those who asked for this feature to be brought back. See for example comments 46, 49, and 54. Taking away a feature is not a good thing. I would rather have had this be an end user settable option (a global default for the site, and a per user settable option). Until the feature is back with a technical solution that is acceptable to the powers that be, users can use this patch for CVS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 15:14 : Goba kbahey, please, what is the problem with setting the ini setting with ini_set() runtime? It would work without fiddling with the $path and $domain... Also note that your patch contains a lot of unrelated changes... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ February 12, 2005 - 16:06 : kbahey Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/user-module-session-3.patch (2.04 KB) Sorry. The patch was for a lot of things by mistake. Here is the patch only for user.module. As for ini_set(), I can do: ini_set ("session.cookie_lifetime", number_of_seconds); But again, number_of_seconds has to be stored in a varaible, which will be another option. Will we get the objection "no more options" again? However, as I understand it, ini_set() has to be called before session_start() which is the first thing in includes/session.inc. Can variable_get() be called that early in Drupal life span to get the stored value? On a related note, why don't we have the following defaults set in conf.php, so regardless of .htaccess or php.ini, we ensure they are set in Drupal no matter what? ini_set ("session.cache_expire", 200000); ini_set ("session.gc_maxlifetime", 200000); ini_set ("session.auto_start", 0); ini_set ("session.save_handler", "user"); ini_set ("session.cache_limiter", "none"); ini_set ("session.use_trans_sid", 0); ini_set ("session.use_cookies", 1); ini_set ("session.use_only_cookies", 1); This also has the advantage that every domain in a multi-domain installation can have their own settings, if needed, instead of just one .htaccess. -- View: http://drupal.org/node/2974 Edit: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/2974

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