Hi All,

	I am having a problem with a catalog search/shopping cart's cookies not always 
working.  I'm hoping some folks in the server's group can help point me in the right 
direction because this crosses the border between programming and CGI/server stuff. 

The host is a Red Hat Linux Box (version 6.1) running an Apache Web Server and the 
CGI script is written in Perl which identifies itself as being "This is perl, v5.6.0 built for 
i686-linux".  I'm Using cgi.pm for setting cookies etc.

Here's the problem:  I can get the cookies to work fine on my dial up connection 
(which by the way is a different guy than my client's host) , a Road Runner 
broadband connection and even from behind a corporate firewall at my "real" job.  My 
client has no problem from his office, however, we are getting a large number of 
customers complaining that our script is telling them the cookies have disappeared.

Since the catalog search works consistently OK for me and for my client, I'm 
guessing the problem is not in the script. As a matter of fact, my client was on the 
phone with one of his customers, duplicated keystrokes and mouse clicks and the 
customer got the non-cookie error and my client didn't.

Here's the Perl code for setting the cookie:

      $sslCookie = $cgi->cookie(-name=>'sid',
				-value=>"$new_sid",
				-expires=>'+30d',
				-path=>'/',
				-domain=>".broinc.com");
      print $cgi->header(-cookie=>$sslCookie);

{HYPERLINK "mailto:hwg-servers(at)hwg.org"}Every time a new search is performed on my client's catalog, the cookie is 
refreshed with a new 30 day expiration date.
Besides some folks having old browsers and/or cookies turned off does anyone 
know of a reason why some folks would get a cookie and others wouldn't?  Any 
web sites which might help explain this behavior ?   
Tested by me with Netscape 6.0, 4.7, IE 5.0 and 5.5 all Windows versions.
<Begin half baked possibility>
I've heard some ISPs cache web pages locally to cut down on traffic out to the 
"real" web.  Could this be a possibility?
<end half baked possibility>
Thanks in advance - sorry to be long winded.

--------------------------------------
Charlie Kunce

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