Question

I’m developing a Rails 3 app on Ubuntu 10.10 and need to check the CSS and Javascript on IE7 and IE8, so I’m using VirtualBox and the images that Microsoft provides. I’ve gotten the images installed and running well – I can use IE7 and IE8 to access the internet and use sites just fine.

I can also access my development Rails app (running on Ubuntu) by visiting 10.0.2.2:3000 in each browser (not sure why that works and localhost doesn’t, but oh well). Any GET on a page that doesn’t require the user to be logged in renders as I’d expect it to.

What’s wrong are the sessions – as near as I can tell, both IE7 and IE8 are both just completely ignoring sessions with the development app. Whenever I submit the login form I get an InvalidAuthenticityToken error, and sure enough, in Rails’ error page, the values in the session and params don’t match. I even set up a special route to automatically log in the visitor as a random user, but it doesn’t work. I just downloaded and installed Firefox in one of the virtual PCs and it’s having the same problem as the IEs are.

Everything works perfectly in Chrome/Firefox in Ubuntu, so it doesn’t seem to be Rails, and apparently it’s not IE. I suppose there’s something I’m missing with VirtualBox, but I have zero experience with virtualization before today, so I don’t even know how to begin troubleshooting it.

Any advice?

Answer 1

Figured it out: The cookie wasn’t being set because I was visiting the app through the ip address (Rails’ :domain => :all option for the cookie store apparently doesn’t cover that eventuality). I pointed lvh.me to 10.0.2.2 in the hosts file in WinXP, and everything works great.