problem with wiki requiring cookies even if they are already allowed

[hellik]

taken from ML

​mail1 and ​mail2 and tested here with ​wiki

Login error
OSGeo Wiki uses cookies to log in users. You have cookies disabled. Please enable them and try again. 

with several IPs and computers; cookies are enabled.

[strk]

Also reported as #1976 and I confirm having the problem with multiple browsers too (cannot login, system says I don't have cookies enabled, which I clearly have)

Harrison, Christian, Jeff: did you guys change anything recently ?

[Jeff McKenna]

I didn't make any recent changes, not sure why this occurred.

It seems that this is a common issue though, and one of the solutions is to modify php.ini with the following change:

session.referer_check = off

I restarted Apache and now I can login.

It is a quick-n-dirty solution, maybe the original error is due to a session file trying to write to a write-protected folder? (not sure why the permissions would change suddenly though).

Or maybe someone did an update on that VM and PHP was upgraded? Not sure.

Let me know if this change is enough.

[strk]

I just received an email from the Cron daemon on that machine: no space left on device. That explains impossibility to write cookies ! Do we want another ticket to deal with that Jeff ?

[Jeff McKenna]

that would explain this. sorry for my mistake.

[Jeff McKenna]

sandro, since you found it, do you want to tackle??

[Jeff McKenna]

i am re-enabling that setting now...

[hellik]

Replying to Jeff McKenna:

I didn't make any recent changes, not sure why this occurred.

It seems that this is a common issue though, and one of the solutions is to modify php.ini with the following change:

session.referer_check = off

I restarted Apache and now I can login.

It is a quick-n-dirty solution, maybe the original error is due to a session file trying to write to a write-protected folder? (not sure why the permissions would change suddenly though).

Or maybe someone did an update on that VM and PHP was upgraded? Not sure.

Let me know if this change is enough.

-first try: login possible

• second try after removing osgeo wiki cookie: login possible

[Jeff McKenna]

i have reset: session.referer_check = on

[Jeff McKenna]

Here is the space available on that VM:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda3              16G   13G  2.3G  85% /
tmpfs                 2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                   10M  112K  9.9M   2% /dev
tmpfs                 2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/vda1              99M   25M   70M  27% /boot

Looks fine to me. Maybe someone is making space now as I type?

[strk]

I hadn't touched the machine, and it looks like we're the only one who logged in the last few hours (but the wtmp is *really* short)

For the record, the received mail:

Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2017 06:25:28 -0700 (PDT)                                                         
From: Cron Daemon <root@osgeo.org> 
Subject: Cron <root@wiki> test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily 
        ) (failed)        

/etc/cron.daily/man-db:                                  
/usr/bin/mandb: can't write to /var/cache/man/30183: No space left on device                
run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/man-db exited with return code 2   

[Jeff McKenna]

for now the initial fix of 'session.referer_check = off' is working. until we find a better one :)

[strk]

I confirm it is working, although documentation seems to suggest the value of that variable should be a substring to be found in the HTTP_REFERER: ​http://php.net/manual/en/session.configuration.php#ini.session.referer-check

BTW, it's documented to default to the empty string

The file /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini is not part of the libapache2-mod-php5 package, so I wonder how it got there in the first place.

Now the directory is under a local git repository (for the future)