[pmwiki-users] Redundant logins

[Petko Yotov]

> Has the authentication changed in 2.2.23?

No, but problems have been reported when in config.php $EnablePageVarAuth is 
set to something different from 0. It was introduced in 2.2.22 and disabled by 
default in 2.2.23. This variable is not required.

What was your previous working version before you upgraded to 2.2.23 (and 
before 2.2.22)? What kind of authentication are you using (AuthUser, 
DefaultPasswords)?

> Whenever I view a page (e.g. SiteAdmin or ?action=edit) that requires
> authentication, it always shows the login form even if I'm already
> logged in.
> 
> This happens again, and again, and again, no matter how many times I log
> in, log out, clear cookies, or force a full refresh.

If pmwiki suddenly starts to act like this, there could be three kinds of 
causes: a PmWiki upgrade, a browser upgrade, or a server up/downgrade.

A new PmWiki version could have broken something - even if we use the latest 
version and we fix bugs as we find them, this is a possibility. If you know 
which version used to work fine, we could see what changed since then.

A new recipe or recipe version version could also be responsible.

After an upgrade, your browser might have stopped accepting cookies. This is 
rare, and in that case, you wouldn't be able to log into other password-
protected websites like a webmail or a forum. You could test your wiki with a 
different browser or from a different computer to see if it works.

A change in your hosting server software could have caused this. A while ago, 
we needed to adapt PmWiki to work with the new PHP 5.3 versions which had many 
changes. We fixed all problems that we found (except one with very short 
passwords on some PHP versions on Windows) but there could be more. If we 
could look at your wiki and test it, we may find the problem. It would be 
useful to enable the PmWiki diagnostics tools with such a line in config.php:

  $EnableDiag = 1;

Last problem that I think of is something could have caused the 
"session.save_path" directory to become write-protected. This is rare - could 
be a disk-full problem or a server/PHP misconfiguration. It should be possible 
to select your own directory for the session data near the beginning of 
config.php:

  $SessionDir = "$WorkDir/.sessions";
  mkdirp($SessionDir);
  fixperms($SessionDir);
  session_save_path($SessionDir);
  unset($SessionDir);
 
Petko