[Pubcookie-users] Pubcookie bug?

[John Mullins]

We've had an issue come up with using pubcookie, and I'm
wondering if anyone else has seen this behavior:

When a user uses a submit in one of our cgi programs, they should
be brought back to the previous page (displaying info about something
that they've changed) with the info updated.  But sometimes they'll
get redirected (twice) and eventually end up on a page that says 
something like

	UW NetID Logo

	Thank you for logging in

	Click to Continue

If they click on the continue button they end up at the same place, 
strangely if they keep clicking continue after a few times they finally
end up back where they belong.

We've discovered if the G cookie has expired, the pubcookie cgi renews 
this cookie and then does one of 2 things:

   1. If the page the user tried to access has no POST arguments (called
      "post_stuff" in the source) then the cgi does this:

	tmpl_print_html(TMPL_FNAME, "nonpost_redirect", ...);

      This reads a template file that redirects the user back to the
      correct web page, this works fine.

   2. If the page has POST arguments (eg the user has filled in a form
      to update an account for a jack and clicked "submit"), then it
      manually generates some HTML that's supposed to do the same
      redirect but include the POST arguments.  This is broken, they
      end up on the "click to continue" page I mentioned above.

   The function that does this is print_redirect_page() in index.cgi.c.
   The code that's broken begins

	if (l->post_stuff) {
	  /* broken code here */

Any ideas?

Thanks,
John

-- 
John Mullins                         www:    http://www.usc.edu/~mullins
University of Southern California    e-mail: mullins at usc.edu
Information Services Division        phone:  (213) 740-2870