Pankaj Kumar's Weblog

Login problems with Drupal powered site

Ran into an interesting situation with a Drupal powered sub-site: could log into the site via http://pankaj-k.net/ but not through http://www.pankaj-k.net/ (bot domain names, pankaj-k.net and www.pankaj-k.net, point to the same site). Did a bit of digging at Drupal.org and found that I am not alone.

Though, I did observe a few things that might help in identifying the real issue.

I have a Drupal installation on a host which can be reached via browser by either http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com. I can login into the site through http://domain.com without any problem, but not through http://www.domain.com (the login block comes up on page refresh, without any notification, as reported by others). Though, there are a few things that puzzled me:

1. If I login through http://domain.com, close the browser without logging out, open the browser again and point it to http://www.domain.com then I continue to be logged-in and can access the site without any problem.
2. If I log out from http://domain.com, delete all the cookies and then visit http://www.domain.com and login then the login SUCCEEDS. Logging out and logging in to http://domain.com also SUCCEEDS (ie; login to http://domain.com always succeeds but login to http://www.domain.com succeeds only when there are no cookies for http://domain.com)
3. The above observations are with IE6. With FireFox, login through either of the URLS, http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com succeeds. I even tried a number of sequences of login and logouts in different permutations and all work fine.

Makes me feel that there is something weird going on with cookie handling!

Have posted these observations to Drupal issue log.