"Steve Bennett" wrote:
On 9/11/06, Nick Jenkins wrote:
Save a backup copy of the cookie file/details,
jump onto IRC and do a
/join
Can you explain what you mean by "cookie file/details"?
Steve
Cookies of the wiki site you currently have. You can use an extension like
WebDeveloper to show them.
In Firefox, you can get to the Firefox Cookie Manager by going Tools -> Options ->
Privacy -> Cookies -> View Cookies -> search on
"en.wikipedia.org" -> gives a list of 4 "enwiki" cookie details,
namely "Token" (a string like "190a876023442342327c4c63fac6234"),
my "UserID" (a integer like 83912), my session id (generated by PHP, a string
like "ce679422680757a63b324238cae08fcc"), and a
UserName ("Nickj" in my case). (And just to be clear, I have modified those
token / UserId / session values from their actual real
values to prevent session hijacking).
Alternatively, you can look at the raw cookie file - it's just a text file :
* In Internet Explorer, cookies are stored on a single file-per-cookie basis, and the path
would be something like this:
"%SystemDrive%\Documents and
Settings\%username%\Cookies\%username%(a)en.wikipedia[1].txt"
* In Firefox, it looks like they're all stored in one file, whose path is probably
something like this on a Windows system:
"%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application
Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%MOZ-PROFILE-NAME%\cookies.txt"
Essentially cookies are a form of persistent client-side storage for letting the server
store simple state and having the client
communicate that state back to the server in subsequent requests; in less jargony terms,
it's what allows you open a browser, to log
into the Wikipedia, close the browser, reopen the browser, go to the Wikipedia again, and
still be logged in: it's remembering who
you are. And that's why when it goes wrong, and people end up being treated as users
that they're not, then getting the cookie
details is the first port of call to see what's going wrong. It could also be good to
have a look at the server-side cookie details
(e.g. cookies can be stored on the server side in a database, on disk, etc.) for any open
sessions for the user they've become, and
for the user they're supposed to be. Where to go from there is less clear ;-) but
that's probably where to start.
All the best,
Nick.