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Basket and session problems for customers using AOL
Question
Customers are reporting that my site does not work properly with AOL when using the AOL web browser. When items are added to the basket, they seem to disappear. The site seems to work fine when they switch to another browser such as IE, Firefox or Opera.
Answer
This session problem in v6 was fixed with the release of v6.038 - 16 Sep 2006.
The issue was that the full AOL install installs a version of the AOL browser that is hard coded to request pages via AOL proxy servers. This means that the user is not connecting directly to CactuShop, but instead connects to an AOL server which requests the page from the CactuShop site, and then serves it to the user.
Because AOL's proxy servers seem to be load balanced, each page request may be dealt with by a different proxy server, and hence appear to have a different IP address when the page request is made to the CactuShop installation. This disrupted CactuShop's session handling, which linked sessions to users by a combination of unique ID, random token (to prevent simple interception of others' sessions) and IP address.
The fix was to remove the IP check in the session code, so that sessions could be maintained even if the user's IP appears to change with each page request. This has been confirmed by those affected as a solution to the problem.