[imp] Re: Timeouts/Content Advisor

[Charlie Reitsma]

A colleague on campus was finally able to explain why turning on Content 
  Advisor in Internet Explorer broke our IMP. He even suggested a fix 
that turned out to be correct. He used Ethereal to watch an imp session. 
Content Advisor checks the Document Root of the site for rating 
information with a "GET /" request. When Horde or IMP are the root of 
the site this request is redirected and begins a new session. The "GET 
/" request needs to use the session cookie already assigned. The problem 
is solved by changing the cookie_path in horde/config/registry.php from 
"/horde" to "/".

Searching for "cookie path" in the IMP list demonstrates that this 
information is well known for virtual hosting. The Content Advisor 
symptoms just haven't been attached to it.

The users who have had these problems don't run Content Advisor but they 
probably have some sort of spyware/adware that acts similarly.

My thanks go to Sergey Kanareykin who solved this problem for me.
--------------
I have run into this as well.  I've found that
enabling IE's content advisor will cause this
behavior.  Very few machines have this turned on so
that's why you are seeing such a low percentage of it
and is also why it doesn't happen when they try
another computer.  I don't have a solution for you
though (only a note of it on my "Known Issues" page).
;)

I did post this a while ago, but I really didn't go
into it much since I just found it at the time (and
I'm not going into it here either cause I still don't
know much about it ;).  Here's my favorite response to
that post:

 > Well, IMP is known for its explicit language. ;-)

Not much help, but gave a good laugh after a
frustrating day.  ;)


Hope this gives you some sort of lead.  Good luck,
David


Myke Place <mp at xmission.com> wrote:
 >
 > Hello,
 >
 > We are using IMP 3.1 and Horde 2.1 and for the most
 > part we are pleased to
 > report that everything runs smoothly for about
 > 25,000 users. We use IMAP
 > for the mail retreval method. We do have a small
 > section of users with
 > problems that I would like some help or suggestions
 > from the IMP/Horde
 > community in solving.
 >
 > It seems that some of our users (at most fifty or
 > sixty out of the 25,000,
 > that I am aware of,) experience problems wherein
 > they login sucessfully
 > and are presented with their read and unread
 > messages in IMP. The problem
 > occurs when the user clicks on a message to read it.
 > As soon as they do
 > so, they are immediatly returned to the logon
 > screen.
 >
 > I am baffeled because, so far, I haven't found
 > anything tying this
 > behavior together in the webserver or PHP logs. I
 > don't see IMP or Horde
 > register a logout in any logs either. It appears
 > that they simply login
 > again and again, are presented with the messages,
 > and then after clicking
 > on one, they are booted off.
 >
 > What's interesting is that for these users, if they
 > login from another
 > machine, it works fine. Often it just starts for
 > them out of the blue,
 > working fine one day and then broken the next.
 >
 >  My questions for all of you are:
 >
 > 1) Has anyone seen this type of behavior before? I
 > searched the IMP/Horde
 > mailing lists archived on MARC and Google and I was
 > unable to find any
 > indication of this problem occuring nor a possible
 > solution.
 >
 > 2) Could this be a cookie issue? Could somebody
 > perhaps describe what
 > effect the cookies that are set have on a users
 > session?
 >
 > 3) If this is a browser issue, are there any known
 > patches that solve this
 > problem? Any suggestions on troubleshooting from
 > this angle?
 >
 > I would be happy to provide log file snippets or
 > temporary logins for
 > anyone who would be willing to take a crack at this.
 > I'm pretty much
 > baffeled at this point, I will indeed appreciate
 > some clarity. TIA.
 >
 > --
 > Myke Place
 > mp at xmission.com
 > www.radiojournal.org