Random Admin Logouts - SOLVED (Well in this case...)

[prestoav]

Posting in the hope this helps someone out of a hole!

Having built 20+ sites on PW in the last couple of years (and loving it...) I came across a really odd situation recently.  The client's IT company and I 've been battling for a couple of weeks and today, finally, we have an answer!

The site is built and temporarily housed on a shared hosting account we have for development. All tested well here so Access was granted to the client to start adding content. 

The next day I get a call from the client to say the admin side of the site is logging them out every 30-40 seconds and they have to log back in again each time to continue. I tested again from our office with their login but all worked as expected. Other browsers, PCs etc. were all tried by the client but the problem persisted.  So, I get in my car and drive to the client's site. Sure enough, I see the issue on one of their iMacs. So I open up my MBP, connect to their network, log in as them and the problem is there. So, next, I came off of their network and onto my tethered iPhone on 4G. Bingo! The problem goes away.

So it's their network that's the issue.

Their IT company were called and, with us helping them wherever possible, they worked on it for 2 weeks to find the problem. I captured the port numbers in use by PW admin (60992, 60993, 61000, 61001, 61002, 61003 by the way) and the IT company opened those ports on the router but still, the problem remained :-(

And then the breakthrough...

They have two VDSL lines into the building that feed their router through a load balancer. It seems that their setup meant that responses to outbound traffic did not necessarily come back in via the same line. Processwire admin does not like this!

So, the IT company put in a rule to direct all traffic from the IP of the shared hosting through the same route in and out of the building and BOOM! it all works as expected. Phew!

All's well that end's well but it certainly put us through the wringer tracking it down. Actually, I think it's pretty cool that PW does this. A good extra security measure. Several other CMSs (no names...) worked just fine with this scenario but not PW.

Anyway, happy client, happy me. Hopefully, this story helps someone else here too.