Logged out during test

[maccaj22]

Hi,
I've had some students reporting a problem with being logged out while completing a test.
I'm running 3.6 build 6152

I've made sure that the automatic logout time is sufficiently high enough to not cause the problem (30minutes) and I can't define the exact circumstances under which this occurs but I have seen it mainly on tests that take more that 5 minutes.
When the student logs back in, the test answers they were trying to submit are lost which is extremely annoying.

Has anyone else seen this happen or experienced it? Any ideas of a fix?

[skippybosco]

@maccaj22: Have you checked your eFront logs to see if there are any clues there?

Do you have concurrent logins allowed on your system (and is there a chance that someone else is logging in with the user's id?) If you enable to allow concurrent login does the problem go away?

Could also check with your host if there is any kind of garbage collection that happens that may clear out your /tmp directory on a regular process?

[maccaj22]

Hi Skippy!
Concurrent logins is already turned on so this isn't helping unfortunately. I highly doubt someone else is logging on with the same username as all students are given individual details.
We host on our own VPS and from what I can tell the /tmp directory has no regular processes.

Where do I check the efront logs?
Thanks

[skippybosco]

Anything specific about the users that are experiencing the problem?

Does it happen more consistently with one user versus another?

Anything common like browser type / version or the specific test they are taking or something they may be entering in as an answer that may be causing problems (special characters, cut and paste from third party app ,etc)

Are you able to reproduce the issue with a test id or their user id?

Logged on as admin, go to Maintenance. Any errors or warnings?

To see logs, logged on as admin go to reports -> user reports and type/select the users name. Click on the traffic tab, set the time range and click the analytic log checkbox and push show.

[maccaj22]

I can't reproduce the fault myself and I haven't seen it happen more often with one user over another.
Now that I think of it I believe they were all using IE 7 and 8...

There is nothing special about the questions or answers; some users get logged out when doing a matching question, some with multiple choice and others short answer.

No errors under the maintenance tab.

Nothing odd is showing up in the logs either, just that they were logged out. I will continue to monitor the situation and try to get students to report it more if it happens. I'll try to find browser type and exact test ID...
Thanks

[JimNg]

I have the same problem, where some users are logged out while taking a test.

I am suspecting facebook integration as I have the facebook connection turned on. I noticed that Efront checks with a Facebook site frequently if the user has a mapped account with facebook. Could this be the issue ?

[maccaj22]

Unfortunately I don't have facebook integration enabled so I don't think it is causing my issue...
Thanks for the suggestion though!

[papagel]

We cannot reproduce this behavior internally.
The only thing that comes to mind is that the sessions time outs somehow or that the same account is used by more than 1 users simultaneously.
If someone can come-up with a reproducible set of actions we would be happy to check this once more.

[JimNg]

Hi Papagel,

I will try to trouble shoot or tweak out the issue next week. If I caught such a situation again (there is a account that seem to have the recurring problem - every hour or so), what kind of data from the computer do you need to examine to figure the issue ? Log files, cookies ?

[skippybosco]

JimNg / maccaj22: are you seeing the issue anywhere else besides tests?

Any commonality of the test such as timed versus not timed?

One thing to try (really outside of the box) is to map your session.save_path to some other location via a custom php.ini in your efront\www directory. Change it to something different than the default (make sure to create the directory and give correct permissions) and see if this changes the behavior.

PM me if you need assistance in changing this setting on your system.