problem with cookies

stegerpl · Posted: Mon Jul 05, 2010 8:14 pm Post subject: problem with cookies

Hi,

I have a heating control behind a DSL-modem (Austria) which I can access via internet for remote control - NAT within the router + dyndns.

The heating control offers a web-interface which registers one single user by a cookie (four single characters, upper case). This cookie has to be sent by each action (moving within the different menu levels). If this fails the interface just returns an error message that another user is already logged in.

When I access from a Windows machinge everything is fine. But from my gentoo machine I get the error message after login. I can not move within the menu levels at all.

I checked already if the cookie is accepted (by my gentoo machine) => yes, looks fine (firefox shows it)
I tried firefox, konqueror and opera => all the same
I tried to disable iptables => the same
When I connect from my vmware - Windows (on my gentoo machine) => the same
I also checked the ASCII-coding => ISO-8859-1 as well -15 and UTF-8 (within firefox, my gentoo uses UTF-8 )

The producer of the heating control claims, that they can not reproduce this effect by working with fedora and suse (I guess from a virtual machine). However they are willing to help me to resolve the problem.

I think that my gentoo makes some small changes with the cookies while sending them - or is it possible, that the system blocks the sending of the cookies at all ?

Any Ideas?
Which information do you need to help me?

kernel = 2.6.32

Peter
_________________
[1]... AMD Phenon X4-9950 on asus M3N78-EM with 4 GB of RAM - gentoo 10.1 - kernel 2.6.32 - kde 4.3.4
[2]... AMD Athlon XP 2500+ mobile on ASUS A7N8X with 512 kB RAM and 2xTT S-2300 - vdr-1.6.0 based on gentoo-2008.0

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21633

If this application uses plain HTTP, which would be very bad, try to get a packet capture of it. If it is using HTTPS, a browser extension may be able to log the traffic. You say that it fails for a Windows guest running on your Gentoo host, correct? Were you using Internet Explorer or Firefox in the Windows guest? My first thought is that they failed to support non-IE browsers, though their willingness to help troubleshoot a problem reported by a Linux user could be seen to argue that they are aware of non-IE browsers.

aCOSwt · Posted: Mon Jul 05, 2010 9:47 pm Post subject: Re: problem with cookies

Sorry for not understanding everything.

Mad Merlin · Veteran Joined: 09 May 2005 Posts: 1155

stegerpl · Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2010 4:04 pm Post subject:

Hi and thanks to everyone...

@Hu: I was running Windoof XP as a client within my gentoo Linux host with vmware. Within the Windoof XP client I am using only IE (the same version as on the Windoof machine where everything works).

@aC0Swt & Mad Merlin: is there a (simple) way to check the request header for the correct cookie ? Is it possible that there is an option somewhere within gentoo-linux which makes trouble with this request header (e.g. changing upper/lowe case) ?

Peter
_________________
[1]... AMD Phenon X4-9950 on asus M3N78-EM with 4 GB of RAM - gentoo 10.1 - kernel 2.6.32 - kde 4.3.4
[2]... AMD Athlon XP 2500+ mobile on ASUS A7N8X with 512 kB RAM and 2xTT S-2300 - vdr-1.6.0 based on gentoo-2008.0

stegerpl · Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2010 4:34 pm Post subject:

Hi,

I checked (for the first time) with tcpdump and the output shows as follows:

madchaz · Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2010 7:13 pm Post subject:

Linux (or gentoo) directly as nothing to do with cookie handling. That's your browser's job. The OS doesn't care about it.
Did you try to flush all cookies then try again? Made sure you properly loged out on the other machine?

Stupid questions, but who knows.
_________________
Someone asked me once if I suffered from mental illness. I told him I enjoyed every second of it.
www.madchaz.com A small candle of a website. As my lab specs on it.

Mad Merlin · Veteran Joined: 09 May 2005 Posts: 1155

cach0rr0 · Posted: Wed Jul 07, 2010 12:02 am Post subject:

with tcpdump it would be more useful if you saved the output to a file, and opened said file up with something like wireshark

e.g.

stegerpl · Posted: Wed Jul 07, 2010 4:16 pm Post subject:

Hi,

stegerpl · Posted: Wed Jul 07, 2010 6:16 pm Post subject:

Hi,

with wireshar I found the following discrepancy in the tcp-traffic:

heating => PC: Set-Cookie: TAID="KTQE";\r\n
PC => heating: Cookie: TAID="KTQE"\r\n

The difference is the semicolon - however I do no know if it realy gives an effect - anybody knows more?

Peter
_________________
[1]... AMD Phenon X4-9950 on asus M3N78-EM with 4 GB of RAM - gentoo 10.1 - kernel 2.6.32 - kde 4.3.4
[2]... AMD Athlon XP 2500+ mobile on ASUS A7N8X with 512 kB RAM and 2xTT S-2300 - vdr-1.6.0 based on gentoo-2008.0

szmytson · n00b Joined: 29 Apr 2009 Posts: 20 Location: UK

Generally, madchaz is right - it most probably is not OS related.

1. Try using different browser on your Windows box (FF, Opera)
2. If you want to digg in further install tcpdump on the Windows box, dump the web traffic to a file and compare it with the one from Linux