Admin Keepalive Timer [Support Thread]

[DrByte]

I'm getting to this discussion a few months later but I hope it's useful to others.

I've just implemented the Keepalive Timer module in the admin area and I had the same problem where the keepalive.php page was being called through ajax and kept falling 5 times until the TEXT_KEEPALIVE_SERVER_UNREACHABLE_MESSAGE1 pop-up.

I found it has to do with the $.ajax timeout value set to 450ms on line 170 in the /admin_area/includes/javascript/jquery.idletimeout.js file.

Increasing that value to 3000 (3 seconds) solves it for me.

@DrByte I'm wondering if calling the keepalive.php every minute during 10 minutes isn't defeating the purpose of having a 15 minutes session? Every time the keepalive.php script is being called, I see the expiration time on the session increase.

If "idleAfter" is set to 600 seconds (10 minutes) before actually being defined as idle, it means the actual session still has 15 minutes to go. So, one can leave its computer idle for 10 minutes and still have an active session expiring in 15 minutes for a total of 25 minutes?

I may need to tweak it a little, the company I work for are pretty serious about PCI. Thanks for the module!

Ya, I've been meaning to look at that further. It probably should only do the ajax ping if the user gets the popup and says "ya, i want to continue working".
Definitely open to code-change suggestions if you've got time to look into it.

[jazzman346]

Ya, I've been meaning to look at that further. It probably should only do the ajax ping if the user gets the popup and says "ya, i want to continue working".
Definitely open to code-change suggestions if you've got time to look into it.

Good point! I didn't think about changing the code this way but I'll come back to it. I just had too many things to work on beside the idle timeout. My goal will be to create a session timeout into the Front End within a month or two, feature request from my boss.

So right now, beside changing the jquery.idletimeout.js to 3 seconds, I've set the Admin Session Timeout to 300 seconds (5 minutes).

I've also changed line 84 of the keepalive_module.php file to :

warningLength: <?php echo SESSION_TIMEOUT_ADMIN-70; ?>, // countdown timer width remaining session time minus polling time (last keepalive call) + 10secs buffer

That way, I do respect the 15 minutes PCI specs and it seems to work fine. Of course, I'll get feedback from the real admins in the next few weeks.

[jazzman346]

Following my last post, I proceeded with my latest release including the Keepalive timer module. It was working so well for me for the last three weeks so I was certain there would be no issue. Unfortunately, there is one -> Admin Profiles. I'm a super user, I can access any pages ... not the regular users. As a result, they get the "We are unable to connect to the server. [...]" pop-up after 5 failed requests (5 minutes) as the keepalive.php page called through AJAX always returns the denied page for them.

So, the fix for this is simple. We need to put it in the exception pages array on line 49 of the /admin/includes/init_includes/init_admin_auth.php in V1.5.5

if (!in_array($page, array(FILENAME_DEFAULT,FILENAME_ADMIN_ACCOUNT,FILENAME_LOGOFF,FILENAME_ALERT_PAGE,FILENAME_PASSWORD_FORGOTTEN,FILENAME_DENIED,FILENAME_ALT_NAV,FILENAME_KEEPALIVE)) &&

Then in /includes/filenames.php we need to add the corresponding constant :

define('FILENAME_KEEPALIVE', 'keepalive');

[torvista]

All the language constants used by this/in ZC156 are defined in the code:

if (!defined('TEXT_TIMEOUT_WARNING')) define('TEXT_TIMEOUT_WARNING', '**WARNING**'); 

1) I assume the correct place for the translations is /extra_definitions?

2) Is this practice something that will be implemented in the future, or it's a one-off to simplify installation of this particular plugin?