Red Hat Knowledgebase

Solution:
It may be that the URL is violating the cookie spec.

Here is a example where a URL is violating the cookie spec, so cookies are not being set and login is failing:

This is trying to set a cookie with the following headers:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 00:15:40 GMT
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 00:15:45 GMT
Content-Length: 10325
Content-Type: text/html
! Set-Cookie:
CBTCookies=AEKx97f71ZWE1AyJjG2OnPUVelRFydikxBzE0zxAI7RPYC5o6Qzu!
2082922036!-271887879; path=/

In the example, it is setting the key "CBDCookies", the value "AEK...879", and the path "/", but using defaults for all of the other fields.

When searching the cookie list for valid cookies, a comparison of the domain attributes of the cookie is made with the Internet domain name of the host from which the URL will be fetched. If there is a tail match, then the cookie will go through path matching to see if it should be sent.

From the Netscape document "Persistent Client State HTTP Cookies" (http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html), in the section on the 'domain' parameter:

domain=DOMAIN_NAME

"Tail matching" means that the domain attribute is matched against the tail of the fully qualified domain name of the host. A domain attribute of "acme.com" would match host names "anvil.acme.com" as well as "shipping.crate.acme.com".

Only hosts within the specified domain can set a cookie for a ! domain and domains must have at least two (2) or three (3) ! periods in them to prevent domains of the form: ".com", ".edu", ! and "va.us". Any domain that fails within one of the seven special top level domains listed below only require two periods. Any other domain requires at least three. The seven special top level domains are: "COM", "EDU", "NET", "ORG", "GOV", "MIL", and "INT".

The default value of "domain" is the host name of the server which generated the cookie response.

Command Center's web client library follows the Netscape cookie spec. Since the cookie is being served from the host cambridgeesol-cbt.org which does not have 2 dots; And since the default value of the 'domain' cookie is the server host, the cookie is invalid and is being ignored.

One workaround would be to create a host alias for cambridgeesol-cbt.org (i.e. "monitoring.cambridgeesol-cbt.org") and use it as the hostname in the monitored URLs.