[plug] My Life as Greg Mildenhall

Trevor Phillips phillips at central.murdoch.edu.au
Fri May 12 16:16:17 WST 2000


Christian wrote:
> 
> Visiting www.linuxtoday.com today I got a surprise when it told me that
> I was logged on as "Greg Mildenhall"!  Recognising the name, I figured
> it was something to do with the fact I was on Murdoch Uni's network and
> Greg (for memory) is on UWAs but I would normally have expected that
> being "logged on" to a web site would have involved a cookie of some
> sort so I don't really see how it could have happened.  Anyone got any
> ideas?  (BTW, Greg, aren't you supposed to be writing up your Honours
> thesis at the moment, not browsing LinuxToday...? *grin*)

*ARE* they using Cookies?? They're good for tracking sessions, but an alternate
method sometimes used (where cookies are possibly "off" or not trusted) is to
use values like the clients Remote IP as ID, and keep track of session details
on the server. Personally, I'd use a couple of fields, such as Remote IP,
Browser Agent string, etc, but it means that if more than one person is coming
from the same IP (eg; thru one Proxy), and using an identical browser, etc,
then they may appear to be the same person.

Could that be it?

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: CWIS Systems Administrator     -           T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
| IT Services                       -               Murdoch University | 
 >------------------- Member of the #SAS# & #CFC# --------------------<
| On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of     /
| course. But mostly evil, on the whole.                             /
 \      -- (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)                          /



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