We have a web application through which customers access information. It has been reported by many customers that they are logged out within 5 minutes of no activity. I believe this should only occur after the default 20 minute idle timeout, and this is the case when accessing the web app from inside our domain.
I also spent a few days troubleshooting an error in which some of the user's session data was lost between post backs about 60% of the time, causing an application error since the next page needed the data. The only resolution was a work-around in which I use an additional mechanism for caching the data between postbacks and pull the data from that cache if the session data is gone.
I have also noted that some websites that I visit which require logon credentials will also kick me out between postbacks. For example, a website for a school I take classes at requires logon credentials to their portal. At home I never have any issue, but if I access it from my work domain I often get random errors indicating that my credentials have been lost (i.e. "Unauthorized access is not permitted" after logging in and browsing to a page).
Combing the web for ideas has led me down a few paths, but most address the IIS worker process and ASP.NET and have not helped me.
Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions about how to resolve this?
this is not because of the programming problem...this is because of your host capacity...as you know session are a type of memory that is create for each user when they access to your website and it's terminated when they finish visiting...so in this case I suppose the number of site visitors has risen up,so by default when the memory become full, it kicks one session out and causes all these problems...I think the best thing to do is calling where you get your host services and ask for a service that cover sites needs
You just store your session value in to cookie so you can access that value when session terminate.. or you can use global file to manage session state..
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I have a web application (.net VB code) that utilizes session variables to store the username (here login name) and the profile (admin/client), authentication is handeled by asp membership. The application then relies on these session variables on the load events. This application has been running fine for a couple of years. However, recently users complain about occasional error messages after logging in and attempting to load a new page that needs one of these variables. It happens most frequently Chrome, but also IE and Firefox.
Users that experience the error need to log out and clear the browsing history, after that it works again. The error is not easy to replicate - I was able to trigger it on my machine 'violently' using the 'back' button a couple of times that eventually tripped it - then I had to clear my browsing history to get the application to work again.
What might cause this to happen?
the session gets set on the load event of the 'login' page with 'Session("Type") = "Admin"' and subsequent pages check for the value of Session "Type"
I understand that I could use a cookie instead, but I chose not to for security reasons. Could this be prevented using a cookie instead? or do I need to use the membership.getuser method to get the username and then look up the values in the database? That does not seem efficient.
Ideas?
FYI, the ASP.NET Session ID is stored in a cookie that travels back and forth with each request/response. The actual session state values for a given session are not stored in cookies ... they are stored on the server only. They could be stored in memory, or in a SQL database, depending on how you've configured ASP.NET Session State.
But Session State can get destroyed for a variety of reasons. IIS might suddenly decide to restart your Application Pool, for example, in which case all your Session State would be gone.
Basically, you need to write your web app to always handle the possibility that Session State may be empty. If it is empty, then you probably need to redirect the user to the login screen to enter his credentials again.
Clearing the browsing history should have no effect, so I can't explain why that would help get past the problem.
In my ASP.NET project, I am using Forms authentication. My main.master using LoginStatus control and web.config is set up for "Forms" authentication mode.
Before I log in, the control shows the text as "Login." After I log in, the control shows the text as "Logout." This is expected. However, after clicking around on a few links within the site, the control suddenly starts showing "Login" although I am still logged in. The session is still alive as some of the pages I visit dumps some session information.
Would appreciate if something can point me in the right direction. Regards.
If you are trying to redirect after setting a Session variable using
Response.Redirect("YourPage.aspx");
this may be causing the session token to gets lost, try using the overloaded version of Redirect:Response.Redirect("~/YourPage.aspx", false);
Another problem also may be miss configuration of application pool. If the application pool is configured as a web farm or a web garden (by setting the
maximum number of worker processes to more than one) and if you're
not using the session service or SQL sessions, incoming requests will
unpredictably go to one of the worker processes, and if it's not the
one the session was created on, it will get lost.
The solutions to this is either not to use a web garden if you don't need the
performance boost, or use one of the out of process session
providers.
For more information you can check the link of the original article below: http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/Don_2700_t-redirect-after-setting-a-Session-variable-_2800_or-do-it-right_2900_
I have the oddest situation...
On my ASP.NET website when the application pool recycles the user is logged out. This is fine. I know this is suppose to happen. But when the user logs back in and selects any link within the website, they are logged back out immediately. They consistently get logged out. I don't know what causes this and I don't know how to fix it.
The odd part is the work-around. If I log in from a different computer or from the IIS Server itself than the user that is getting logged out can log back in.
Does anyone have any ideas as to what is happening?
Standard Forms Authentication in ASP.NET is cookie-based and should not be affected by the session vanishing. But, you're probably relying on something in the session to determine whether or not the user is logged in. If you're using in-process session storage (and it sounds like you are), then your application code might act strangely if you get in a state where the Forms Authentication cookie still exists and is valid but the session information is missing. Instead of going to a different computer, try blowing away your cookies and logging in again, and I would presume that your issue is resolved.
One step is to move to out-of-process session storage (such as the ASP.NET State Server, which is simple to use with a few config changes) or to eliminate session usage entirely (by depending on values stored in cookies, though there are security implications there to consider if these values are not encrypted). Then, take a close look at how your application code handles the condition where a login cookie is set but the session data is invalid.
It's a shot in the dark based on the information provided, but hopefully it puts you or someone else on the right track.
I discovered the problem. In the Security settings of the ASP.NET Configuration each user that logs in needed to have one of the roles defined in the "Description" field. This is very odd to me be but it seemed to do the trick. Anyone know why this needs to be done?
I'm seeing multiple users logging in to my .NET 3.5 web application and sharing the same session ID. This appears to be happening most often when users are on different computers on the same network, but it appears to be happening between users on different networks as well. My users are logging in within a minute of each other and getting the same session ID. Consequently, user B is seeing user A's data.
We are using multiple worker processes on the Server 2003 R2 box. Session AND viewstate are stored in SQL Server. Session is set up to use cookies, not URL, to store the ID.
This question is similar to these questions, but neither matches my scenario:
This one turned out to be a false report
This one used IIS7 <--It particularly looks like this one, but I'm on IIS 6, which does NOT use dynamic output caching, right?
Why is my application assigning the same session ID to different machines? How can I stop it from happening?
Edit: I am highly skeptical that session is the culprit, but I am being outweighed by my colleagues. It is more likely that there is a code problem, but I can't explain why the session IDs that we are logging are identical. Yes, there could be a problem with the logging code, but that wouldn't explain why user B is getting user A's stored session data.
Do you have any code that is static (shared in vb.net). This could cause the problem. Also, Session is not truly initialized until something is actually stored in session.
I have an asp .net webforms app that uses forms authentication. For a small number of users we have a problem where they log in, they navigate to a couple of pages and then they are asked to log in again. Once logged in for a second time they seem to be able to stay logged in as expected. They shouldn't be asked to login the second time.
This is a single server, no web farms, nothing tricky.
This only happens to a few users, but it does seem to be all users from the same building. I am unable to replicate this and at this point might even start to deny that t was happening if one of our trainers hadn't watched it happen to a couple of customers.
Has anyone else seen anything like this?
I am also seeing a lot of "Membership credential verification failed." errors in the event log. This may be related, but all the googling I've done seems to point to web farms and the like, not a single server.
UPDATE
There is no proxy server, the IIS server and the browser (IE8) are both on the same machine.
The AV software installed is Symantec Endpoint, on one machine, on the other the user didn't have any AV at all (AV Fail!).
The browser is IE 8 with no frills, not a single addin that didn't come with the default installation.
Both session and user login time-outs are set to 30 mins and the problem happens within 1 min of the user logging on.
Logging shows the user to only have one IP address.
I have tried the sessionMode in all it's variations, this doesn't seem to make any difference.
Something has to be causing ASP.NET to think these users have new sessions or their authentication cookie is getting invalidated. Here a a few things I can think to check:
Are the users accessing the site through a proxy server? One of our customers has a proxy that will sometimes close all open connections causing ASP.NET to see the session as new.
Could an overly agressive anti-virus, anti-spyware product be "eating" the session authentication cookie?
Do they have a cookie manager browser add-in that is causing the authentication cookie to disappear or change?
Sounds basic but I've seen this happen because of site timeouts being set too short. If the user sits on the page for longer than the timeout, they will be forced to logon again. And this could be specific to a page when that page presents a large amount of data that takes a while for them to go through.
One other thing I just thought of, have you allowed multiple worker processes for the ASP.NET process (aka web gardens)? If so, the same constraints as with a web farm would apply for authentication.
Crack open Fiddler from the problem user's PC and see what's getting passed in the headers. My bet is on a proxy server and or networking issue.
Are the users possibly coming from a dynamic ip address? I've seen problems where the users sessions get messed up because the IP address that they're accessing the site from changes for some reason.
Are the people this is happening using a browser that's somehow different (different browser, different version, different extensions)? That could be a clue.
In general, when the problem is somewhat reproducible or at least predictable, I use Http Fiddler. Install it on a client machine, turn it on, and start browsing (this works via a system proxy - so it'll work for firefox, IE and any other proxy-supporting browsers alike). Fiddler will record all http traffic between client and server, and you can then peruse such a session later on to find any oddities.
It's a long shot, but one thing I've seen happen occasionally that can lead to these sorts of unpredictable errors is scripting parallelization issues: sometimes buttons + links have onclick handlers which cause a post-back. If you have several such handlers that fire on the same event - in particular when the default event still fires additionally to your custom onclick or whatnot - you may be causing several postbacks when it appears to be just a single postback. That can cause all kinds of unpredictable weirdness as it's not entirely clear which request ends up "winning" - and some odd errors may cause a session to terminate. Since this behaviour is very browser + network latency sensitive, it seems quite unpredictable when it occurs.
Delete the cookie on the client PC's that are playing up
ASP.NET Forms Authentication can redirect users to the login page if they do not have the credentials to access a specific page. It does this so that users who may have more than one login are given the opportunity to login with another account which may have the appropriate access. Basic question I know, but are the users using the same credentials the second time they log in?
Its possible that you have don't have specifically specified asp.net to use cookie based session but are allowing either cookie or cookieless sessions.
In the later case the session id is embedded in the Url. The type of issues you are experiences might be explained by that. Basically depending on how you define your links, some of them would not get the session id, so the user would get a new session when using those links - or maybe during a redirect. That could explain why at specific parts of your site the users loose their session.
If you have the mixed mode enabled, try setting it to only cookieless and go through your site.
Update: Based on the extra info posted there is surely more info needed for it. Some extra things to check:
Are you using subdomains, if that's the case the cookie might not be configured to allow that and that doesn't fail in all environments.
If you are using in-process session, make sure there isn't a bug in the application causing it to restart the process
Maybe what's causing it to ask for login again is an authorization check, and you have an issue on some roles related code
Is it possible that the user is just opening a separate window? ;)
To rule out the possibility of the browser or a browser addon messing things up, have you checked their User Agent strings? If they are randomly distributed it might not cause the problem, but if they're all the same, this might be a hint too.