Question

I’m having a weird issue that I can’t find any reference to on SO

I deploy my app to staging server daily and it has stopped behaving properly

When I Log in the address in my browser looks like so

http://x.x.x.x/(F(W24RTn2OAE25WANV8wtnrAEVS4VWP7InzD7rCS3narKQgB3F6eqHe04BLLdK2uv2RCzfrwzW5AMPbOGoN99C9aq5WMWP0_brrNTy1HD0EH1nU2G_be9gz_jXYwkZlaQDIjv4NPD-LVr9j2h2teipwjV0yPtr25wEeDrheFNaKcaHqblTFXnNZCjfTJkEJxIN0))/Controller/Action/25

If I delete the junk in there manually so that I can navigate to /Controller/Action/25 I am forced to log in again … upon doing so I am redirected to the correct page but all that junk is back again

http://x.x.x.x/(F(W24RTn2OAE25WANV8wtnrAEVS4VWP7InzD7rCS3narKQgB3F6eqHe04BLLdK2uv2RCzfrwzW5AMPbOGoN99C9aq5WMWP0_brrNTy1HD0EH1nU2G_be9gz_jXYwkZlaQDIjv4NPD-LVr9j2h2teipwjV0yPtr25wEeDrheFNaKcaHqblTFXnNZCjfTJkEJxIN0))/Controller/Action/25

Also, it seems to be a related issue, my autocomplete textboxes no longer work… the calls never hit the DB.

Both pieces of functionality work fine locally on my IIS Express when in debug mode of the source code so I’m thinking it’s the staging server IIS… but am unsure where to look to clear up this issue.. an ideas?

Here is the only thing my web.config is doing with forms authentication

<authentication mode="Forms">
  <forms loginUrl="~/Account/LogOn" 
         timeout="2880" />
</authentication>

At login the action method is the default

FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie(model.Username, model.RememberMe);

This is happening on every browser on my VM and local machine both, but not on another PC. I’ve refreshed all browsers, deleted all cached from each browser

This does appear to be a cookie thing. In Chrome I can see the cookie when I log in to the site in debug mode in the dev tools. Using the same browser if I log in to the site pointing at the staging server there is no cookie being set.

Why would there not be a cookie being set if I am not doing anything to prevent the cookie and have deleted cache, etc?

Answer 1

Is forms authentication configured to not use cookies? In this case it embeds this information in the URL. This would explain why when you delete it you have to log in again.