Please see http://www.liferay.com/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/13908890 for details

I just examined my tomcat access log and I'm seeing the following:

On my first sign in attempt, which fails, I have this log entry:
76.118.185.83 - - [13/May/2012:09:19:24 -0400] "POST /home;jsessionid=E21D703049C3A24C1E825B1A162D5F76?p_auth=ZhsiMJe1&p_p_id=58&p_p_lifecycle=1&p_p_state=normal&p_p_mode=view&p_p_col_id=column-1&p_p_col_count=1&saveLastPath=0&_58_struts_action=%2Flogin%2Flogin&_58_doActionAfterLogin=false HTTP/1.1" 404 654

On my second sign in attempt, which suceeds, I have this log entry
76.118.185.83 - - [13/May/2012:09:20:18 -0400] "POST /home?p_auth=ZhsiMJe1&p_p_id=58&p_p_lifecycle=1&p_p_state=normal&p_p_mode=view&p_p_col_id=column-1&p_p_col_count=1&saveLastPath=0&_58_struts_action=%2Flogin%2Flogin&_58_doActionAfterLogin=false HTTP/1.1" 302 -

The placement of the jsessionid in the first attempt is the only difference I see.

These are the default settings around cookies in the portal.properties file:
#
# Set this to false to disable all persistent cookies. Features like
# automatically logging in will not work.
#
session.enable.persistent.cookies=true

#
# Set this to true to enable sessions when cookies are disabled. See
# LEP-4787. This behavior is configurable because enabling it can break
# certain setups.
#
session.enable.url.with.session.id=true

It seems like the session.enable.persistent.cookies=true is being ignored. I wonder if jsesion is hardcoded in some places by mistake. I see that there were issues with this in the past.

I googled liferay and jsessionid and see some tickets about this issue but they are for older version, but old bugs sometimes have a way of coming back and haunting you sometimes.

I think I just solved the problem by session.enable.url.with.session.id=false however this solution then forces my users to have cookies enbaled.

I was hoping I could get a Liferay guru to respond to this post so I can confirm that its a legitimate problem or not.

Thanks in advance.

In the first request it has to use the jsessionid from url because it doesn't yet know if you have cookies enabled on your browser. It's also recommended to have session.enable.url.with.session.id=false because having jsessionid in the url leads to bad SEO and make session hijacking more possible.

Thanks for your response.

I'm still curious why I don't see this reloading of the home page behavior on the first sign in or create account attempt in 6.05.