201749 - Newsgroups client frequently forgets my username/password

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 36816

(MailNews Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Louis Kruger]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030405
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030405

I have an account on an authenticated news server.  When I am using the Mozilla
client, it frequently pops up the sequence of 2 dialogs to enter my username and
password, even though I check the "remember" checkbox.

Although it happens to me quite frequently, I can't produce a single reliable
sequence of steps that is guarenteed to make it happen.  It is most likely to
happen if I am, say, downloading an article or newsgroup list in one window, and
I double click somewhere to start another operation in another window. 
Sometimes it happens if I click on another article before the first one has
finished loading, or if I click on another newsgroup while the article list is
still downloading.  It never seems to happen if I'm just doing one thing at a
time and always waiting for whatever I did to finish, so my guess is it might
has something to do with creating new threads or opening new connections to the
server?  (but thats just a guess)

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
Connect to a news server that requires authentication.  Enter username/password
when the dialogs pop up and click the checkbox to remember the info.  Start
"clicking around" between different newsgroups and different articles, but don't
wait for any article lists or articles to finish loading.  Sooner or later
(usually sooner) the authentication dialog will popup again (and again, if you
keep doing stuff)
Actual Results:  
See the authentication dialog over and over again even though Mozilla should
remember it.

Expected Results:  
Be more like an elephant.

Comment 1

[Gábor Lipták]

I'm also seeing this problem with

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030408

maybe duplicate with

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=200606

Comment 2

[Sam Dunham]

I can confirm this activity - reproduceable - in Minotaur (don't know about the
nightlies, but the most recent alpha). Due to an error that I got from my ISP's
news server, I believe that what is happening is that the newsreader is
establishing a new connection without cleanly dropping the previous connection.
After four or five of these password requests, I got a message saying that I was
logged in too many times to the server. It also doesn't seem to have anything to
do with having multiple windows open. It happens to me as I'm going through
individual messages in a single group (maybe going to a new message before the
current message has completely loaded).

Comment 3

[Manuel Reimer]

I use Mozilla since version 1.0 and I always had this problem. Normally it
happens if I don't do something with my news-account for longer time (a few
minutes). I often get this problem after clicking on "send". When mistyping the
password then, then Mozilla displays an error-message and kills the window where
I wrote the posting. Then I have to copy/paste the text from send-folder in a
new compose message window to send again. This is really bad! Perhaps this
depends on the newsserver. I use news.cis.dfn.de as newsserver.

Comment 4

[dharter]

I have this same problem with
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312

I did find out that my usenet server is running Tornado v.1.0.1.300

Comment 5

[Jonas Kvarnström]

This happens to me too.

I finally got a clue to what might be causing it when I looked at the password
manager.  There are managed passwords stored for
news://myserver/group1#username, news://myserver/group1#password,
news://myserver/group5#username, news://myserver/group5#password, and so on.  In
other words, passwords and user names are newsgroup-specific, not server-specific.

This means (if my theory is correct) that if I have no current connection and I
go to a group for which the password is not stored, then I have to log in again.
 I can then go to any group I want as long as I keep the connection.  If I lose
the connection I once again have to enter the password *unless* I happen to go
to a group for which the password has already been saved.

Does this match your experience or am I describing a different bug?

Comment 6

[Phil Anderton]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 36816 ***