Evaluating - need help with authentication

[Norm Acunis]

All of my web pages have a front end to check and see irf authenticated. If not, they get directed to an authentication page.

In my website "mysite.com", there's an index.htm that redirects to the authentication module.

I've done the indexing of 50 pages during the eval and while the searches bring up the correct page in the list, when I click on the desired result, I end up at the authentication page even though I have already authenticated. That tells me that in zoom's code it references this index.htm page. How can I avoid the redirect fro index.htm? I do not want to authenticate to do a search since it messes with the stats.

[David]

See this FAQ to start with,
Q. How do I index protected parts of my website requiring user authentication?

Without knowing the details of how you have implemented your authentication, it is hard to comment in detail.

I also don't understand parts of your post. Surely all pages on your site require authentication. Not just the home page, index.htm. What is the point of only protecting the home page? You said all your pages have authentication, but then go on to imply only index.htm does authentication? In any case the above FAQ might cover the problem.

[Norm Acunis]

Let's make this simpler

The same search config in IE works fine. Only Firefox sends me to the login page, so if it works in IE and not Firefox, I'm left with not using the product...unless there is an add-on, or something that results in Firefox interpreting and processing your index the same way as IE.

Oh well. Guess it is time to move on. Thanks for trying.

[David]

Our product doesn't contain any login screen. It is a search engine.

So any login page that is generated is being done by your site, or some other 3rd party product. Not by Zoom Search.

The results search produced by Zoom are just plain HTML. So FireFox and IE will display them in the same way.

Without knowing the details of how you have implemented your authentication, it is hard to comment in detail on what might be wrong. If you wanted to explain how you implemented your site authentication and post a link showing the problem we can have a another look at it.

[Norm Acunis]

More on the different response between IE and Firefox

Let's try describing it this way.

1. Yes it is my login screen that is prompted by any link from search results. All modules have this code on line 1 to ensure that they have authenticated:
<?
session_start();
if(!session_is_registered(myusername)){
header("location:http://acunishistory.net/go/auth/main_login.php");
}
?>
If they have logged in, the link on the url line displays, and if someone has not authenticated yet, this code links them to the login page. Absent the search engine, all behavior works the same in IE and Firefox. But with the search engine, it appears that only with Firefox that I am unconditionally linked to the login page.

2) I just don't understand why all of this works perfectly in IE

[David]

All we do is return plain HTML links in search results. So you really need to have a deeper look at your authenication process to see what is going on.

Firefox and IE have different policies for dealing with cookies. So this might be have something to do with it.

Another related possibility is that you didn't accept cookies during indexing and your session mangement was thus done via the URL. That is to say you have session IDs in your search results, that would certinaly screw things up.

Another possibility is that your session mangement needs that every page on your site requires the session to be re-established, and maybe you aren't doing this on the search page and the session is dropped.

Another possibility is that you have placed the search function in a subdomain. And this has messed up the session mangement.

You really need to look deeper in your session mangement, understand how it works, then it should be obvious what is going wrong.

[Ray]

Another possibility is that your session mangement needs that every page on your site requires the session to be re-established, and maybe you aren't doing this on the search page and the session is dropped.

If this is the case, it may essentially mean you just need to call session_start() on the search page.

To do this, see this FAQ:
Q. How can I add server-side scripting (eg. PHP, ASP) to the search template?

You will essentially create a "mysearch.php" which calls the session code you pasted above. Before you include our search script. More details in the FAQ.

Here's one thread I found online where someone reported a similar issue due to a lacking "session_start()" call which only affected him/her in Firefox and not Chrome or IE:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3...ut-not-firefox

[Norm Acunis]

Great answer - Thanks

I appreciate your attention to this. Let's consider the thread closed.