The issue of empty session files
After installing Php everything looked like working fine until I tried to use sessions. The sessions did not work and I looked at the php.ini file and the session.save_path was clearly set to an existing folder with read/write permissions. So I checked that folder were sessions were supposed to be saved and I realised that there were two session files and one contained the correct session data and the other was empty and this clearly showed that sessions were not working.
I wrote two small scripts to test:
//first.php
<?php
session_start();
$_SESSION["session_test"] = "session testing";
print $_SESSION["session_test"]."<br>";
print '<a href = "second.php">Second Page</a><br>';
print session_id();
?>
If sessions are working properly then the session id should be the same in both pages and
that offers a very simple test apart from the fact that the test string should also be shown
in the second page.
The second page script looks like this:
//second.php
<?php
session_start();
print $_SESSION["session_test"]."<br>";
print session_id();
?>
On clicking the link to the second page, the second page had a different session id and the
the test string never showed but instead I got this warning : Notice: Undefined index:
session_test in C:\webroot\second.php on line 3. (after enabling all errors and warning
to show).
After hours of toiling I found out that this issue was caused by the Zone Alarm firewall. I
disabled the firewall and the sessions started working. I have looked through the firewall
log and I cant see exactly where localhost or PHPSESSID is blocked and so for now I will
temporarily disable the firewall when testing script involving sessions and if I cant find a
solution then it could be time to move to another firewall.
delicious | 
digg
