Multiple browsers open causes authentication or session problems

Question

Hi Folks,
I have a strange problem. It's strange to me in any case as I'm primarily a back-end guy so I am not an expert on some of the web features of APEX. I have built an application that accesses many remote databases through database links. I open 4 instances of IE6, each is handed a seperate session id as can be seen in the url. The user provides the db name, user and password in the login page. I authenticate by creating a custom auth procedure which creates a temporary database link to test whether the user and password provided is correct for the chosen database. If correct, I authenticate. With 4 instances, this all works fine. Then I'm redirected to the first page in my application which runs a query against the remote database selected at login. ( table@db_link). If I hit the button to submit the query on the 4 browsers, the 4th one reverts me to the login page as if I am not authenticated. This does not seem to happen if I open 4 browsers on 4 different computers all accessing the APEX application.
Has anyone experienced similar issues or does anyone know if there is some limit on how many sessions from the one computer can be handled. I thought initially that it might have been an issue with some spfile parameters but I'm thinking now that it must be either how APEX handles requests from the same machine or some network/http issue? As I said, when it come to http sessions etc, I am no guru!!
Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Sounds like those browser windows are using the same OS process. Did you start them with CTRL-N ? Try starting them from the Start menu. If they aren't using separate processes they'll share cookies and that would result in the kinds of things you described.
Scott