Ok found the problem. NOT a Tomcat problem but still useful to tomcat developers who might run into it.
Both IE 5.5 and 6 has a new security path out that prevents invalid domain names from storing cookies. Aparently the '_' character I was using in my test configuration for new_tridentms.com was causing IE to reject the cookie used for session state. I changed my domain from new_tridentms.com to newtridentms.com and everything works like a champ. This website helped me out: http://www.caucho.com/support/resin-interest/0209/0457.html Thanks Everyone: Lon Palmer -----Original Message----- From: Lon Palmer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 11:20 AM To: Tomcat Users List Subject: MORE INFO: Host will not save session data All, I found a post at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=tomcat-dev&m=104247780113629&w= that points to a problem with cookies and sub domains using IE 6 and sure enough Netscape 7 has no problem with my site. Of course that is no comfort to any tomcat user considering half the world in on IE 6. So now what. First, there are no sub domains for new_tridentms.com, only www.new_tridentms.com as my email shows. Also the link above says: > My personal workaround (until the bug is fixed) is to move the content from mydomain.com > to www.mydomain.com. so the cookie does not conflict with the cookie > from test.mydomain.com. What does this poster mean by "move the content" to www.mydomain.com from mydomain.com? What does that relate to in the server.xml file or does it relate to where the file content is stored or what? Thanks again in advance for all your help. Lon Palmer -----Original Message----- From: Lon Palmer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 9:32 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Host will not save session data Hello Tomcat Gurus, I've created a new host in my server.xml file for a site, new_tridentms.com. This site is redirected from apache. The problem is this: My new host will not save session info. I created the site on a development server under the "webapps" default host and everything works fine. Only when I move it to the new server in it's own host configuration does it stop storing session vars. I suspect I'm missing some directive under my <Host> tag but I don't know what it is. Another thing that is worth mentioning is that I'm using the MVC paradigm so a one servlet is actually placing the object into the session and other servlets read it out. Here are excerpts from my configuration files: server.xml for Tomcat: ... <Host name = "new_tridentms.com" debug = "0" unpackWARs="true"> <Alias>www.new_tridentms.com</Alias> <Logger className="org.apache.catalina.logger.FileLogger" directory = "logs" prefix="new_tridentms" suffix=".log" timestamp="true"/> <Context path="" docBase="/data/tms_www/new_tridentms" debug="0" reloadable="true"/> </Host> ... httpd.conf: .... <VirtualHost X.x.x.x:x> #IP Masked out to protect my server :) DocumentRoot /data/tms_www/new_tridentms ServerName www.new_tridentms.com ServerAlias new_tridentms.com ServerAdmin [EMAIL PROTECTED] JkMount /*.jsp tomcatworker # My servlets are mapped using a .jsp after the servlet name to avoid naming problems with the apache connector. </VirtualHost> .... Thanks so much for your help. Lon Palmer Software Engineer Trident Micro Systems
