making permanent changes to the path of cookies - cookies

Where can I make changes if I want to make permanent changes in cookie-path value for my website. will that be in context.xml or web.xml or will that be using newCookie.setPath() method only? The server is Tomcat 6.0. I did look online but have not found anything, to the point.
Its just that there is some problem with the session tracking and admin thinks that this requires changing path of my session cookies from /site-folder to /. Is he wrong?

It might not be something considered good programming trick, but to change the sessioncookiepath value, web-app>METAINF>context.xml file is the place. For perticulary my problem, putting following code helped: Context sessionCookiePath="" This might be due to my website structure.

Related

Create subdomain for each user that signs up

I am developing a project in Coldfusion with CFWheels MVC Framework with URL Rewriting enabled. It involves user registration and each user should be presented as username.domain.com instead of www.domain.com/users/username. Moreover once I am on username.domain.com all child pages should work as:
username.domain.com/page1
username.domain.com/page2
username.domain.com/search?k=xyz
... etc
which I am unable to achieve.
I have updated my DNS settings of the particular domain so that *.domain.com all point to the same host. What am I still doing? I found this configuration , but I have not figured out how to implement it.
Sorry this is more of an extended comment than an answer
The code has a name of coldfusion-subdomains.cfm but it looks like something that would go into application.cfc. If you look at https://github.com/cfmaniac/CF-SubDomains , it states
CF-Subdomains is a snippet of code (best used in your OnRequest Method of Application.cfc) to detect and include files from a subdirectory on your server and let it act like a subdomain.
So from here, I would go to the cfwheels documentation so see if it does anything special with OnRequest()
I don't see anything that wraps around OnRequest(), so maybe it can be used as is
You may also want to consider url re-writing instead
http://docs.cfwheels.org/docs/url-rewriting

CFWheels: Redirect to URL with Params Hidden

I am using redirectTo() function with params to redirect to another pages with a query string in the url. For security purpose this does not look appealing because the user can change the parameters in the url, thus altering what is inserted into the database.
My code is:
redirectTo(action="checklist", params="r=#r#&i=#insp#&d=#d#");
Is there anyway around this? I am not using a forms, I just wish to redirect and I want the destination action/Controller to know what I am passing but not display it in the url.
You can obfuscate the variables in the URL. CfWheels makes this really easy.
All you have to do is call set(obfuscateURLs=true) in the config/settings.cfm file to turn on URL obfuscation.
I am sure this works with linkTo() function. I hope it works with RedirectTo() funcation as well. I do not have a set up to check it now. But if doesn't work for RedirectTo(), you can obfuscateParam() and deObfuscateParam() functions to do job for you.
Caution: This will only make harder for user to guess the value. It doesn't encrypt value.
To know more about this, Please read the document configuration and defaults and obfuscating url
A much better approach to this particular situation is to write params to the [flash].1 The flash is exactly the same thing as it is in Ruby on Rails or the ViewBag in ASP.Net. It stores the data in a session or cookie variable and is deleted at the end of the next page's load. This prevents you from posting back long query strings like someone that has been coding for less than a year. ObfuscateParam only works with numbers and is incredibly insecure. Any power user can easily deobfuscate, even more so with someone that actually makes a living stealing data.

Analytics _setDomainName not working anymore

This suddenly stopped working. We have Google Analytics on our page and a couple of months ago we tweaked the code so that GA's cookies would only be set for www.igre123.com and not it's subdomains (we do a redirect from igre123.com to www.igre123.com, so that users are always using www.).
We did this because we have two subdomains that serve static content (css, js, thumbnails, etc) from (s.igre123.com and static.igre123com).
To prevent cookies being set for the subdomains (and only for www.) we modified our GA code to look something like this:
...
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName','www.igre123.com']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
...
This did the trick but now it's not working anymore. Anybody have some idea why this stopped working? Unfortunately I don't know when exactly this stopped working :/
edit: tracking otherwise works without a problem.
OK after much head banging I managed to solve this mystery. Turns out that the order of the _gaq.push([]);'s is relevant. If you have, besides the usual _setAccount and _trackPageView, any other GA calls (like _setCustomVar), that set cookies, you have to tell GA which domain to set cookies for first. Seems obvious in retrospect but to be fair, that's not really clear from the documentation.
Anyhow be sure to put the call to _setDomainNamefirst, and then any other GA calls you might have.

Django caching bug .. even if caching is disabled

I have a Django site where a strange bug is occurring.
On the site they can add "publications", which is basically the same thing as a blog post under a different name.
Things gets weird when they modify an existing post. They first modify it in the admin and when they go on the site, the change isn't visible. Like if the old version was cached.
In fact, at the beginning I was pretty sure it was a browser caching bug. But after some trials, things got a little weirder.
I found out that clearing browser cache or using a different browser does not solve the problem, but rather interestingly it toggles between the old version and the modified version upon refresh.
So if the body of the post was "Hello World" and I modify it to be "Goodbye cruel world" and then go to the site and refresh the page multiple times, I would see "Hello World", then "Goodbye cruel world", then "Hello World" and so on.. no matter how long I keep doing it.
But it doesn't stop there .. after about 24h everything falls back into place and work normally. No permutation anymore, the site sticks to the new version...
I'm pretty much speechless because I built well over 50 other Django sites using the same server and I never had this problem before.
I'm using the latest django (1.3) with a MySQL DB and caching is not enabled..
Any ideas ?
Edit: A graceful restart of Apache solve the problem .. but restarting apache after each update isn't the greatest thing..
Update: I've just re-setuped my dev environement and I found out the bug is far more acute with the dev server. The modified contend won't show up until I kill/restart the dev server, no matter how often I refresh or clear my cache..
The problem is explicitly addressed in the generic views documentation. The querysets in your extra_context dictionary are evaluated once, when the urlconf is first processed, and each time after that they will continue to use the same values. That's why they only change when you reset Apache or the dev server.
The solution, as described on the linked page, is to use callables which return the querysets, rather than specifying the querysets in the dictionary itself.
I had a similar problem once. It turned out I created the object at the top of the urls.py, and the object was alive as long as the process was alive. You may be using a global variable in one of your views.
There are a few other ways to control cache parameters. For example, HTTP allows applications to do the following:
Define the maximum time a page should be cached.Specify whether a cache should always check for newer versions, only delivering the cached content when there are no changes. (Some caches might deliver cached content even if the server page changed, simply because the cache copy isn't yet expired.**)
In Django, use the cache_control view decorator to specify these cache parameters. In this example, cache_control tells caches to revalidate the cache on every access and to store cached versions for, at most, 3,600 seconds:
from django.views.decorators.cache import cache_control
#cache_control(must_revalidate=True, max_age=3600)
def my_view(request):
# ...
Any valid Cache-Control HTTP directive is valid in cache_control(). Here's a full list:
public=True
private=True
no_cache=True
no_transform=True
must_revalidate=True
proxy_revalidate=True
max_age=num_seconds
s_maxage=num_seconds

URL Rewrite in DotNetNuke remove chunk of address (and read cookie?)

I am working on a DotNetNuke application using the iFinity URL Master module. (that may be irrelevant, as a solution may be platform independent)
What I have is a site with addresses based on language.
so
www.thesite.com/en/products/towels/redtowel
is the english version and
www.thesite.com/de/products/towels/redtowel
is the german version.
What I need to do is allow a user (who has already visited the site and set a cookie with their language) to be able to go to www.thesite.com/products/towels/redtowel and get to www.thesite.com/en/products/towels/redtowel if their cookie is set to english, and /de/products/towels/redtowel if it is set to german.
How would I do this?
if it was me and i didnt want to spend a lot of time programming I would look at something like this
http://www.snowcovered.com/snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=242&PackageID=10059
then it could do a redirect based on the cookie - otherwise with iFinity I think you can do that sort of but not exactly. (I may be wrong on that - not a fan of iFinity url rewriter)