Authentication problems.

[SAPA IT Guy]

Hello. I am testing the free version prior to purchase and here's the problem I am running into. I search these forums and didn't find a post that addresses it or anything in the FAQs.

Our site is ASPX and password protected with forms authentication. I set your program to use IE cookies and I logged into IE7 and signed onto the site. I left that window open and tried to crawl the site with your program and received an error staing to check the url and confirguration. I did.

I turned on verbose logging and found that even though I have already logged in and am still displaying the site prior to crawling, the crawler is being redirected to the login page. The server is obviously not recognizing whatever the program uses to login with.

Any suggestiosn on how to get this working since offline mode obviously won't work with aspx? I noticed that even opening another instance of IE and going to the site, the site doesn't recognize the previous authentication, even though it's still open. Is there a way to tell IE to share the cookie differently or something?

Thanks.

[Ray]

First thing to check, in case you haven't already, is this FAQ support page on authentication:
Q. How do I index protected parts of my website requiring user authentication?

There are various ways that authentication can be implemented, so there is no single answer. Form Authentication in ASPX is implemented with cookies and sessions as far as I know. The questionable part is when these cookies timeout or whether there are any additional checks being made by your scripts or ASPX which restricts the cookie's validity (for example, it may try to identify the client user-agent and behave differently for a browser than a spider).

However, given that you see the same problem when you open a new IE window, I would say the problem might be that the cookie is expiring or the session is timing out or being considered invalid.

Here is a blog entry on the new timeout default in ASP.NET 2.0 which is causing problems for some people:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archi...08/430011.aspx

Perhaps your timeout value is set to something very low? Note that since pages can sometimes be cached, you may not be making as many server requests as you think you are.

Another clue - according to this thread, ASPX form authenticated sessions are limited to the domains and base URL of the page that generated the cookie. So if you are spanning across multiple/different domains (even if it is just 'http://www.mysite.com' vs 'http://mysite.com') this might make ASPX consider them to be different sessions. I would recommend narrowing the problem down as to why your session is invalidated from simply being accessed by a different IE window.

[SAPA IT Guy]

Thanks.

It was a timeout problem, or rather that it wouldn't presist the cookie across sessions unless I set it specifically. Once I did that it worked.

The other issue I ran into was I followed the tutorial on making an ASPX page and it works great until I type a search word in the main search page. The submit button on that page only submits to the old search term.

Example, I search for "test" on the main page. It goes to Search.aspx with the proper querystring and results. If I type "blah" on the cgi generated search input field and hit submit, it returns the same results with "test" as the querystring parameter. Did I miss something in the setup for the configuration?

Thanks!

[Ray]

You might need to disable the auto generated search form, and copy+paste your custom one to your search template page. This can happen if your ASPX templates contain master <form> tags which wrap around the whole page, and prevent any other <form> tags from appearing within the page.

To disable the generated search form, click on "Configure" in Zoom Indexer, select the "Search Page" tab and change the "Search form:" dropdown from "Advanced" to "Do not generate".