Posted by John Swartzentruber on 03/02/05 16:03

On 3/1/2005 3:52 PM John Swartzentruber wrote:
> On 3/1/2005 2:12 PM Jason Barnett wrote:
>
>> John Swartzentruber wrote:
>>
>>> Somehow my PHP 5.0.3 or something is configured incorrectly. When I try
>>> to get past an authentication input, nothing happens. For example, I
>>> have phpMyAdmin configured now to use mysqli, but when I enter the
>>> username and password, the screen doesn't change. In previous testing, I
>>> saw that an incorrect authentication was detected and reported, but a
>>> correct authentication had no affect.
>>
>>
>>
>> Not sure if this is a phpMyAdmin bug or not, but you might try to clear
>> out all cookies that your browser has from john.swartzentruber.us. For
>> that matter you should see if you *have* any cookie set from
>> john.swartzenruber.us. I'm not pointing fingers at phpMyAdmin, but just
>> tossing out a possible solution.
>>
>>
>>> My phpinfo() output is at http://john.swartzentruber.us/test.php
>>>
>>> For example, I'm trying to use a simple file upload script called "file
>>> thingie" that is at http://www.solitude.dk/filethingie/download.php
>>>
>>> I have edited the original file only to decrease the maximum file size
>>> to 500 bytes and limit uploads to text files. I hope no one here tries
>>> to be nasty. The user name is "USERNAME2" and the password is
>>> "PASSWORD".
>>
>>
>>
>> Yeah... I wouldn't suggest putting user / pw combos onto the web even if
>> you intend on changing it later. You just never know.
>
>
> Well, if someone can get past the login page, at least someone is making
> progress :-)
>
>
>>> Can anyone check this out and give me some clues or things to look into?
>>> Is there some setting that would cause _POST data to disappear? How
>>> would I go about debugging this?
>>
>>
>>
>> Start by going to the form page's action page (since your test.php page
>> only displays phpinfo() I'm not sure what this is going to be). We'll
>> call this page action.php.
>
>
> I forgot to mention that the page in question was
> http://john.swartzentruber.us/test.php I'm working on creating an even
> simpler script, but since I'm not that familiar with either HTML forms
> or PHP, it is taking some time. In these examples, the action page is
> the same page as original page (i.e., "filethingie.php"). When I look at
> the page source (i.e., the PHP output) in my browser, this is what the
> form looks like (sorry about the word wrapping):
>
> <form action="filethingie.php" method="post">
> <h1>Please Login</h1> <input type="hidden" name="log_lang"
> value="en" /> <div>
> <label for="log_user">User: </label><input type="text"
> size="15" name="log_user" id="log_user" />
> </div>
> <div>
> <label for="log_pass">Pass: </label><input type="password"
> size="15" name="log_pass" id="log_pass" />
>
> <input type="hidden" name="action" value="login" />
> <input type="submit" value="login" />
> </div>
> </form>
>
>
>
>> The simplest way to debug this (but it's effective) is to
>> var_dump($_POST) at the top of action.php. Insert this at the very top
>> of the page (likely to cause a lot of errors :) and then gradually cut /
>> paste that code throughout the action page. Do this until you narrow
>> down the problem code.
>
>
> Well, I've been trying print_r($_POST), and it is always empty. That's
> the problem.
>
>
>> Since this is a file upload script you are doing you will probably want
>> to var_dump($_FILES) as well. Heck, if you're having *session* problems
>> then you should be looking into the $_SESSION array and (possibly) the
>> $_COOKIE array.
>
>
> I'll try removing the session stuff to see if that is significant. It
> looks like $_SESSION is also empty, although I do see what appear to be
> session files created in /tmp, which is where they go.
>
> To summarize, it appears that the problem is not with authentication per
> se, but is that $_POST is empty when the script is called from a form in
> the same file.
>
> I'll try to test this using a different action script and see what
> happens. In the meantime, if you see anything or have any other ideas,
> please let me know. I appreciate you taking the time to help.

I've got some more information and I hope someone can help me figure out
the problem. I changed my original PHP program so that the form action
script is a different script. In that file, I just do a var_dump on
$_POST and $_SERVER.

When I do that, it looks like all of the data comes through correctly.

On the other hand, when the form action script is the *same* script that
contains the form, when I do the same var_dumps, the data does *not*
have any $_POST data. Also, the _SERVER[REQUEST_METHOD] is "GET", not
"POST" in this instance.

So it appears that my problem is that when I post to the same script I
am running, things don't work. I still have no idea why this would be
the case. Does anyone have any ideas?

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