[imp] Occasional login failures

[Thu Nguyen]

I am an IMP/Horde newbie, having a very weird problem that I could not find 
answer reading through the mail archives.  I could only describe my problem 
in layman's terms:

I have installed

IMP 3.0 on Horde  2.0 running in RH7.2  /Apache 1.3.20 to read mail from a 
POP mail server on Solaris 2.7, having IMP to do the Authentication,

for staff to read their mail while away from office.  Normal use in office 
is Eudora.

After the launch, everybody is happy, then I started to have this 
problem:  On a day, about one out of 3 users cannot log-in.   No amount of 
flushing of cache, cookies or changing browser/terminal  helps.  I think 
it's user-related, and has something to do with coolies that I don't 
understand. Next day those users can log-in fine, and different users 
starts to have problem.  The message is login failed for some reasons blah 
blah ... They all log-out properly.

Taking me, I am using 3 test accounts, A B and C.  On a good day, on a same 
browser session I can log-in and work fine with all three.  More often than 
not, I have problem with one of them, and had to wait  to the next day to 
be able to log-in on that account, and another might have problem.  A 
failed login session would have a sess_#### file of 212 bytes while a 
successful login shows size of 660 or more bytes.  A combination of 
removing cookies on browser/deleting corresponding sess_### file does not 
help either.

I tried in php.ini to have session.use_cookies set to 0, cookie_lifetime to 
0, diable cookies in browser: the failed user remains completely blocked 
(until tomorrow, that is)

I am grateful to have some lights into why it is so, and what can I do to 
get rid of it, or my 100+ department might lose interest in IMP

Thu Nguyen
Rookie SysAdmin
Dept of Geomatics
Uni of Melb