For the benefit of anyone reading this later, in an archive presumably, the problem turned out to be (most likely) caused by a long standing Firefox bug – see the following cases for further details: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=707156 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137852 However, I have found that by moving my "admin" files (with a different password) to a folder that's at the same level as the "members" files, rather than a sub-folder of the members files has reduced the incidence of the problem to virtually zero, i.e. it hasn't re-occurred yet :-) Graham I run a website for a local club. The site is divided into three sections, public, members only, and administration with the files for each section in a separate folder on the server. The members and admin folders have their own (different!) passwords, set up in .htaccess files – I’m not a U**x heavy, so I’ve used the Cpanel tool provided by our ISP to set up the security, but as far as can I tell by looking at the files, they’re all set up OK. Now, the problem is that using Firefox to access the admin part of the site, occasionally the browser sends the security credentials for the members area rather than the admin area, and as a result the server denies access. I think that the reason for this is that the admin files are in a sub-folder of the members files, and hence they inherit the members area’s security as well as having their own security. It seems unlikely that this is a Firefox bug as I’m sure it would have been detected before, but since I use that browser almost exclusively and the problem only occurs randomly it’s difficult to prove that accessing the site without problems using IE for a while points the finger of blame at the browser. I’ve used the Firefox add-in LiveHTTPheaders to examine the headers the browser is sending back, and hence I can see that it’s sending the credentials for the wrong part of the site, i.e. the members area, when it goes wrong. If I move the admin folder to a separate part of the file tree at the same level as the members and public files is that likely to fix the problem? I presume that if I refer to some files in other parts of the tree (to get common CSS files, images, etc.) they will then work OK, or do I need to have copies of them in the admin folder? Thanks, Graham |
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