On Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:44:57 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote: > On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 11:16 AM, Dan Nessett <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> We have been experiencing problems with MW 1.16.2 related to logged in >> users on client machines where the IP address changes. I have looked >> over the Bugzilla reports but could not find anything obviously >> related. >> >> If a user with a laptop logs into the wiki, puts the laptop to sleep, >> moves to a different location and then attempts to continue processing, >> the logs show his changes mapped to an IP address (or on one of our >> wikis as anonymous), rather than his user name. A simple thought >> experiment suggests the cookie presented to the wiki after the laptop >> move has a different IP address than the request message. This confuses >> MW, giving the user all his permissions (since he is logged in), but >> not properly identifying the user's name in the logs. >> >> > Session cookies are not tied to IP addresses. Most likely, the session > has simply expired -- it won't make a difference whether you come back > on a different IP or the same one, expired session data will kill your > login. > > Note that in the case of session expiration, the caching workaround that > we perform on logout (setting a 'logged out at time X' cookie) doesn't > work, so you may initially see a couple page views that still look like > you're logged in. You should not see this confusion on the actual edit > page itself -- this won't be cached so should show you that you are not > logged out. > > Consider increasing PHP's session lifetime: > http://us2.php.net/manual/en/session.configuration.php#ini.session.gc- maxlifetime > > the default is 1440 seconds (24 minutes), meaning that a session which > doesn't get touched for 24 minutes may get destroyed during garbage > collection. > > > It's also possible that there's something else in your system which > introduces an IP-address dependency for sessions, such as the session > encryption option in the suhosin plugin with some unsafe configuration > options used: > > http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/ configuration.html#suhosin.session.checkraddr > > -- brion
Thanks for your reply and for the clarification about sessions not associating with IP addresses. However, it seems unlikely that session expiration is the problem. Our wikis require login before users can do anything other than view pages. However, when the situation I described previously occurs, the user is able to edit pages and do anything else his permissions allow when logged in. The problem appears to have something to do with the way IP addresses are mapped to user names by the logging logic. That is, the session is still active, but when entries are made in the logs, the username is replaced either by the IP address of the request or by the generic identifier "anonymous" (different behavior on different wikis - probably a configuration issue, which I am investigating). -- -- Dan Nessett _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
