user sessions problem/question

[Adam Arrowood]

Hi,

We're trying to rotor imp 3.0 across multiple machine and don't want to use a 
shared filesystem for common session handling. We are using a MySQL database as 
the backend session store, via a inhouse bug-fixed version of the code at:

    http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/ying20000602.php3

The problem I'm having is with starting/destroying/starting a session in the 
same user access. When a user logs out of IMP, a session_start is called (via 
Registry.php) and then the following code is hit:


         if ($registry->getMethod('auth/logout') == $registry->getApp()) {
             include_once HORDE_BASE . '/lib/Auth.php';
             Auth::clearAuth();
             session_destroy();
             @session_start();
         }

Well, if my session store in the php.ini is 'file' or 'mm', it works fine. But 
if it is 'user', the apache child handling the request segfaults. This happens 
on linux (redhat 7.1) and Solaris (8). I know it sounds like a php bug (I wrote 
a simple test script to verify that it happens outside of horde/imp too), but my 
temporary fix got me to thinking, why not just clear out the session instead of 
destroying it? This fixed the problem of logging out:

         if ($registry->getMethod('auth/logout') == $registry->getApp()) {
             include_once HORDE_BASE . '/lib/Auth.php';
             Auth::clearAuth();
             global $HTTP_SESSION_VARS;
             foreach($HTTP_SESSION_VARS as $key => $value) {
                session_unregister($key); }
         }

(I'm sure there's a better way to do what I did... I'm not a php guru, for sure)...

Anyway, is there an advantage to destroying a session and then starting a new 
one versus just clearing out the current session? If the user doesn't log back 
in, the session will just be garbage collected anyway, right?

thanks,
Adam Arrowood
adam@oit.gatech.edu

-- 
Adam Arrowood || http://www.gatech.edu/adam
Office of Information Technology/O&E/CS
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA USA