That's not a great way to do session IDs. There are a few reasonably reliable ways:

  1. Take a hash of the username, IP address, and date/time of login. This should be unique as long as no one is cheating. ;-)
  2. Use a *sequential* ID in your sessions table. Hash this with the info above and it *will* be unique.
  3. Just use Data::GUID and store the Globally Unique ID (GUID) it generates as your session key. This is, actually, the simplest in my experience. It also guarantees uniquness and avoids the odd chance of hash collisions and such that the former two risk.

In either case, save only the session ID in a cookie (or, if you prefer {and are willing to do a little extra work}, you can pass it in the URL and not use cookies at all). In the sessions table, store an expiration time; each time you check for a valid session, you can update the expiration (unless, of course, the session has already expired).

This seems to be the best approach short of implementing some kind of full-featured auth scheme on the server side.

<-radiant.matrix->
A collection of thoughts and links from the minds of geeks
The Code that can be seen is not the true Code
I haven't found a problem yet that can't be solved by a well-placed trebuchet

In reply to Re^3: Perl and Cookies by radiantmatrix
in thread Perl and Cookies by htmanning

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