[Catalyst] C::P::Authentication IE Problem - Time Issue

[Wade.Stuart at fallon.com]

Mitchell Jackson <mitch.lists at onsitesquad.com> wrote on 08/27/2007 06:03:13
PM:

> I was experiencing a weird annoyance with C::P::Authentication today.  I
> saw reports of similar symptoms in the list, but nobody with my
> particular solution.  In Firefox everything was working fine, but in all
> the IE browsers auth cookies weren't being stored.  Eventually I grabbed
> a HTTP Session inspector to see how the cookies were being set.  The
> expire time on the cookies was sent as GMT several hours in the past.
> Seeing this, I was a bit amazed firefox was storing the cookies at all.
> The time on the server had slipped back about half a day.  An update to
> my server's ntp config and everything was back to normal.
>
> My lesson for today is:  Catalyst is smarter than me!  ^^

      IE is sensitive to the server side time,  firefox seems to offset
from client time (or at least a minimum amount of cookie would be in the
past).  Anytime you hear that a cookie issue exists on IE but not firefox
your first suspect should be the server time.  This can be a big issue on
virtualized servers (vmware) that do not have the proper time config on
them for the host (or a OS that does not respect the types of time updates
that vmware is pushing out).  I have seen poorly configured hosts drift as
much as 3 hours per hour on vmware.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf



>
> As a side note, is there a way to control the session length of the
> authentication cookie?
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> /Mitch
>
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