I'm still struggling with this problem without being able to solve it, so here I'll write more details and maybe someone will be able to help me figure out why the feature isn't working correctly and if it's a problem of my configuration or a bug in Drupal.
I use a relatively unmodified version of Drupal 4.5.2 The only "quirk" is that the engine is in a /drupal/ subdirectory. So the real address is: http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/ To redirect there I have an .htaccess directly into http://www.cesspit.net/ which just contain a line: DirectoryIndex drupal/index.php
This redirects to the subdir whenever the basic address is accessed. and it seems to work. I cannot install drupal in the main directory because the http://www.cesspit.net/admin/ shortcut is used by the provider to access the admin pages of the website, so it prevents drupal to work in the case I install it there. The other technical details are that I use PHP 4.3.8 and Apache 2.0.50
The .htaccess file in have on the /drupal subdirectory is exactly the one in default package. The only difference is that I followed the instructions, replacing <IfModule mod_php4.c> With: <IfModule sapi_apache2.c> This considering that I run the site on Apache 2.
But this didn't produce any effect. The sessions weren't saved and every time I closed the browser I had to log in my site again.
To solve this problem I had to directly edit the php.ini file in /etc/ So I searched for the session.cookie_lifetime and set it to 2000000 instead of 0 (the previous value).
From my attempts I realized that my site simply ignores what's written in
the drupal's .htaccess. I tried to set the value in php.ini to 8000000 (which should correspond to four months) and the one in the .htaccess to 6000000 (which should be three months). And looking directly at the cookie stored in my browser I saw it always behave as the php.ini value, no matter what value I put in the .htaccess file.
Anyway, setting the php.ini file solved the problem of the cookie. I use Firefox 1.0 as browser and I can see that there's a cookie expiring in May, about three months from now and exactly following the value in the php.ini.
Now the session is somewhat saved. I can shut down the browser, reopen it and I'm still logged in. But if I don't go back within an hour or so I have to relog *again*. So the cookie basically works for some time but then vanishes in the void. Absolutely ignoring the fact that it should last at least THREE MONTHS.
So, please, is someone able to figure out what is happening?
-HRose / Abalieno