On Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:17:04 +0000, Dan Nessett wrote:

> 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).

I need to clarify one thing. For a revision deletion/restore, the 
identifier "Anonymous" appears in the deletion log, not in Recent 
Changes, which has the IP address of the request). Recent changes always 
records the IP address.


-- 
-- Dan Nessett


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