Given, whenever I do session handling, users have an account with the service - but;
I will take their service username and combine it with a random string (Normally the MD5 of my /etc/passwd, just as a little joke), from that I produce another MD5 checksum and store it in the cookie like so:
filmo:3d42e7ab7cd3f127cda36ed2512eb4c6

The MD5 checksum allows me to verify (in a relatively secure manner) that the username stored in the cookie is the one I assigned to that cookie in the first place.
I keep track of "users browsing" by keeping a DB table with a username and datestamp, and each time they hit any of the CGIs (the sites I deal with are generally entirely generated from perl CGIs anyway), I update the datestamp, thus keeping track of who's on and who's not. I run a cronjob every half-hour to remove idlers.

Someone has already mentioned that IPs aren't a particularly affective way of tracking user sessions. I would agree with this, multiple cache proxies are often implemented at large ISPs, and this will make your IP address often times rather redundant.

JP,
-- Alexander Widdlemouse undid his bellybutton and his bum dropped off --

In reply to Re: Implementing Cookies by JPaul
in thread Implementing Cookies by filmo

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