Comments on: Problems with restful_authentication Plugin and Internet Explorer Cookies

By: F

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 02:16:45 +0000

I faced the same problem with IE. IE sometimes does not set the session cookie if its name has an underscore.
In ActionController::Base.session in config/initializers/session_store.rb
the key generated by rails was _projectname_session. Those underscores were the culprit. After removing them, IE set the session cookie.
To help others who may face a similar situation,
this problem manifested every few weeks, not all the time, and disappeared after a few hours. It seems for some people changing the expiration time of cookies fixed the problem
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=625561 , but for me deleting the underscores fixed it.

By: John Trupiano

John Trupiano — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 09:52:03 +0000

Thanks for the extra link George– When you think about it, this is all really my fault. A registrar wouldn’t sell me a domain name with an _. But there’s nothing stopping me from setting up DNS for a subdomain with one…

By: George Anderson

George Anderson — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 04:37:22 +0000

I ran into the same issue. Frustrating, to say the least. After suitably cursing IE, I came to discover underscores are verboten in domain names.

From: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1035

[Domain names (including subdomains] must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen.

Hyphens, yes. Underscores, no.

After working with Ruby for a bit, you start to prefer the underscore to the hyphen. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work with domain names.

Interestingly, using different forms on netsol.com to attempt to register a domain name with an underscore, you either break the page, or get a useful error message: “Please use only letters, numbers or dashes [-]. Do not enter spaces, periods [.] or other punctuation.”