Cannot login to drupal in Chrome or Firefox, but Safari works

Question

Problem: Login is not working in Firefox and Chrome but it does in Safari.

Details:
We just moved a drupal 6 installation to another host and followed some steps:

Moved
sites/site1/Themes/themeFolder
to
sites/all/Themes/themeFolder

Made these changes in page-node-NNN.tpl.php files (searched all files in themes/themeFolder):

1) find: /oldpath/ replace: /newpath/
2) find: oldsubdomain. replace: www.
3) find: .com/sites/ replace: .com/newpath/sites/

Then as I login it fails in any browser when the wrong information is entered but when it is correct it simply redirects to that users profile page...and then nothing. There are no admin menus, no edit buttons for content and it is a though it authenticated but somehow never stored anything that would help with the authentication later.

The strange thing is that for 3 people with three different systems Firefox and Chrome don't work. But Safari does. We have ruled out that it is the database or old cookies.

Any one have a good guess?

Answer 1

Have you checked the $cookie_domain variable in your settings.php? It should be either commented out or adjusted to your new domain. (I faintly remember Safari having a slightly different cookie domain handling model than other browsers - not sure though.)

You could also check the cookies set by the new site in the different browsers directly and compare for differences.

Another (wild) guess would be the date/time setting on the new host. It is pretty unlikely, but if the date is off to the past, the expiration date of the cookies will be off to, and the browsers might deal differently with that.

Also, you surely have flushed all Drupal caches after the move, have you?

Answer 2

I had a similar problem which was caused by a corrupt sessions table in the database. I fixed it by repairing the sessions table following the advice in the article at http://www.go2linux.org/cannot-login-into-drupal-table-corrupted