Hello All,
I have run into some issues lately w/ using IE8 to test a web site that lives at http://test_developer11/ on my company's intranet. It doesn't seem to handle cookies very well for some reason.
I'm using Fiddler to debug and I can see IE 8 posting to the login page, but when the site sends back the "Set-Cookie: Auth=kjksjdkfsdwoiejs...", IE 8 refuses to set it. Not sure what's happening? Anyone else run into this problem?
No sooner did I post this, and I by accident found a way around the issue. I had previously set up a DNS alias to the test server months earlier as http://developer11.corp.mydomain.net/.
I tried that domain and the cookies work now. Out of curiosity, I tried creating a new domain alias in my hosts file as http://testdeveloper11/ which also worked. It appears that maybe IE 8 has a "security" feature in place that blocks cookies from domains w/ underscores.
Anyway, hopefully this post will prevent others from running into the hours of frustration and debugging I've spent on this.
Local Intranet Zone
By default, the Local Intranet zone contains all network connections that were established by using a Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path, and Web sites that bypass the proxy server or have names that do not include periods (for example, http://local), as long as they are not assigned to either the Restricted Sites or Trusted Sites zone. The default security level for the Local Intranet zone is set to Medium (Internet Explorer 4) or Medium-low (Internet Explorer 5 and 6). Be aware that when you access a local area network (LAN) or an intranet share, or an intranet Web site by using an Internet Protocol (IP) address or by using a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), the share or Web site is identified as being in the Internet zone instead of in the Local intranet zone. For more information about this issue, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 303650 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303650/ ) Intranet site is identified as an Internet site when you use an FQDN or an IP address
Taken from here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/174360
I've not had an issue with cookies in the past, but maybe your IE security settings are non-standard.