Apache/php/something not maintaining session id's

Very sporadic, but across multiple apps

[wheel]

I'm getting multiple reports of users not having their login sessions maintained across a variety of programs. Everything from my internal scripts to vbulletin forum software - so I know it's server level not script specific.

What's happening is that they login, Then when they visit the next page, the script acts as if they're not logged in.

This just started happening, I'm suspicious that it's the result of an automatic server upgrade I've done in the past few weeks (I'm running mandrake linux 10.1, and it has a feature to auto-update).

I can't find any commonality amongst the users experiencing this. I strongly suspect one of:
- apache module
- php module
- php config setting

Has anyone heard of this type of problem anywere else? I'm finding a dearth of info on the SE's (though apparently I can buy a book about it on ebay) and of course the problem is critical to me - I've got customers unable to login.

[coopster]

Where are your session files being written? /tmp? Make sure you don't have some sort of process deleting the session files. Also check the PHP garbage collection directives and the other session directives in your php.ini to make sure they haven't been altered.

A quick "check" on this would be to change the PHP session directory to something other than /tmp to see if it is a server process or if it is indeed PHP's garbage collection routine. You may want to copy the open sessions into that directory as you do so in hopes that you don't kill any active open sessions ;-)

[wheel]

Well, that post did it :). I tracked down this variable:
session.use_only_cookies = 0

Which was set to 1. So my system was setting sessionid's for those not using cookies, but then ignoring them when they were passed back.

[jdMorgan]

Glad you found an answer with coopster's help.

Now that that is settled, just wanted to say I got a hoot out of:

I'm finding a dearth of info on the SE's (though apparently I can buy a book about it on ebay)...

:)

Jim