[ic] Clustering Interchange

[Frank]

Hi List,

we are running IC 4.99 on a 4 server cluster. We found we have a problem 
of customers losing sessions when they accessed us via Proxy servers.
So we started working on having the sessions just on one server, but we 
can't get it to run properly.

When trying to share the session directory via NFS, 2 IC servers work 
fine, the other 2 give us a new session id for each access or hang up. 
We have not yet found any difference between the working and the 
non-working servers. The IC user is the same on all 4 machines, with the 
same user ID.

When trying to put the sessions in a MySQL table on a separate MySQL 
server, we face problems of sessions getting locked and not unlocked 
again. Problems seem to vary depending on the session
table definition:

Database  session  KEY          code
Database  session  COLUMN_DEF   "code=VARCHAR(49) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY"
Database  session  COLUMN_DEF   "session=BLOB"
Database  session  COLUMN_DEF   "sessionlock=VARCHAR(64) DEFAULT ''"
Database  session  COLUMN_DEF   "last_accessed=TIMESTAMP(14)"
will result in NULL as contents of the session column and sessionlock 
being filled after first access to a page.

Database  session  KEY          code
Database  session  COLUMN_DEF   "code=VARCHAR(49) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, 
index(code)"
Database  session  COLUMN_DEF   "session=BLOB"
Database  session  COLUMN_DEF   "sessionlock=VARCHAR(64) DEFAULT ''"
Database  session  COLUMN_DEF   "last_accessed=TIMESTAMP(14)"
will result in the session column being filled with values (starting 
with ..1234) and sessionlock being empty.
However, after trying to put the first item in the cart, the session is 
locked and not unlocked again, just like in the first case.

We use Session.pm V.2.14 and SessionDB.pm V2.3. Variables set in 
catalog.cfg :
SessionType	DBI
SessionDB	session
WideOpen	Yes

Any help would be greatly appreciated.