M
Martin
Hi,
(UK)
I have a customer with a strange problem.
Some time ago this customer decided to run all their
systems (servers & clients) at GMT (Greenwich Mean Time),
and not BST (British Summer Time - also called DST,
Daylight Savings Time, I beleive). As we in the UK are
now in BST, this caused all sorts of problems with
Exchange appointments etc - as you can imagine.
Anyway - that is all resolved, and they are happy running
GMT.
Now, they need to access a secure web site in the US,
which runs through a convoluted logon process. At the
final logon screen, after entering credentials, they are
dumped back to the previous logon screen, (no error
messages etc)
From the machine at my office, (running GMT + DST offset)
I can access the site with no problems.
All machines are XPSP1, IE 6, with all latest windows
updates + patches to the OS and IE.
After some investigation, I found that the customer could
access the secure site using Netscape without any
problems at all. But IE 6 failed everytime.
Spent time tweaking privacy settings etc to no avail,
before thinking about the time issue.
It turns out, that because the customer is running GMT,
they have artifically rolled forward all their clocks (by
1 hour) so it appears that they are running at the same
time as everyone else. On 1 machine, I rolled back the
clock by an hour, and hey presto, was able to acccess the
site. I found that the site drops a cookie which
expires after 30 minutes.
So it appears that without rolling the time back, the
cookie is expiring before it is used - hence access to
the site is denied. But surely IE should time stamp the
cookie according to the system time (whatever it is), and
it should always expire after it has been written.
Netscape appears to handle it this way.
Please advise if you consider this an issue with IE, or
perhaps a web site coding issue.
Many thanks,
Martin.
(UK)
I have a customer with a strange problem.
Some time ago this customer decided to run all their
systems (servers & clients) at GMT (Greenwich Mean Time),
and not BST (British Summer Time - also called DST,
Daylight Savings Time, I beleive). As we in the UK are
now in BST, this caused all sorts of problems with
Exchange appointments etc - as you can imagine.
Anyway - that is all resolved, and they are happy running
GMT.
Now, they need to access a secure web site in the US,
which runs through a convoluted logon process. At the
final logon screen, after entering credentials, they are
dumped back to the previous logon screen, (no error
messages etc)
From the machine at my office, (running GMT + DST offset)
I can access the site with no problems.
All machines are XPSP1, IE 6, with all latest windows
updates + patches to the OS and IE.
After some investigation, I found that the customer could
access the secure site using Netscape without any
problems at all. But IE 6 failed everytime.
Spent time tweaking privacy settings etc to no avail,
before thinking about the time issue.
It turns out, that because the customer is running GMT,
they have artifically rolled forward all their clocks (by
1 hour) so it appears that they are running at the same
time as everyone else. On 1 machine, I rolled back the
clock by an hour, and hey presto, was able to acccess the
site. I found that the site drops a cookie which
expires after 30 minutes.
So it appears that without rolling the time back, the
cookie is expiring before it is used - hence access to
the site is denied. But surely IE should time stamp the
cookie according to the system time (whatever it is), and
it should always expire after it has been written.
Netscape appears to handle it this way.
Please advise if you consider this an issue with IE, or
perhaps a web site coding issue.
Many thanks,
Martin.
