I've been playing with a small db demo on my server. Now, every time I try to add, view, anything after logging in as admin I get the error: invalid/expired user session

It says to log-in again. The same error happens, on and on. My DB still works with the default user, however. Can anyone tell me how to fix this?

Email me info@220.com if you have a minute. Thanks in advance.

Several things could be happening. Here's what I want you to do in order to check out the problem.

Open your FTP program and go to the auth directory. Delete any files that might be in there, except for the index.html file.

Go back to DBMan and log in.

Before you do anything else, return to your FTP program and look at the auth directory again. (You may have to reload the directory.) See if there is a file with a name that looks like

username.AVeryLongNumber

If it is there, go back to DBMan again. Click on any of the links. You'll probably get the "invalid/expired user session" message again.

Go back to FTP and check the auth directory again. (Once again, you may have to reload the directory.) See if the file that was there is still there.

I need to know the result of each of these steps. Also, what is the name of your webspace provider? There has been a problem reported by two people so far with one provider, whose name I have forgotten at the moment.

If the file is still in the auth directory, or if it wasn't written there in the first place, we have one problem. If it was written and then disappeared, we have another problem.


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JPD

As per your instructions, I checked the auth dir for extra files. None found. I logged in as admin. The auth directory then showed an admin.NUMBER file. Upon trying a command to view, the admin.NUMBER file was gone and the login error appeared.

My provider is 9netave.

That's the server that has caused problems for two other people.

For the moment, all I can give you is an unsatisfactory workaround.

Go into db.cgi and comment out the line


(To "comment out" a line, just put a # character at the beginning of the line.)

The reason this is unsatisfactory is that you will have to go in from time to time and clean out the auth directory. It's a real pain in the you-know-what, but I don't know any other way around it. One person who posts here -- oldmoney -- said that his databases were working fine until just recently and then he started having this problem.

My guess is that it has to do with the stat function. stat[9] is supposed to return the time that a file was created. I think something has happened on that server so that no value is returned.

If you are able to contact the server admin and get it straightened out, *please* post it here. In the meantime, I'm going to try to figure out some other way of dealing with these files that won't slow down the process of the script.


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JPD

What I'll do for now is comment the line out, do my business, then uncomment it. Thanks for the help.

Hello, fellow 9netave sufferer... time returns EST whereas files written to their server are EST-8HRS. When you FTP up a file, check the time on their side and you will confirm this. So... in sub auth_cleanup in auth.pl, find this line and make the change to add 8 hours to it (that's 28,800 seconds)...
BTW I encountered this problem a week ago and they have yet to give me a satisfactory answer as to why this has happened... me thinks time to go shopping for a new provider soon.

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The Immuatable Order of Modding
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1. Read the FAQ, 2. Search the board, 2a. Search the board again, 3. ask the question, 4. back-up, 5. experiment, 6. rephrase question (or better yet, post solution to original question)

I have another account with CIHost, in May I'll start working on the db's to run my site. I hope I get better results than with 9netave. At one time, I had no complaints about 9netave or their service. When Concentric took over, things started happening frequently. I don't know if the two are related.

Thanks for the help.

Thank you, oldmoney. It's making a little more sense to me. I'll send that fix off to the other person who had the problem, too.


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JPD