Why does Ignite displays the Login page when I click a link?

Symptom

You login to Ignite, click on any link on the Home page, but are redirected to the Ignite login page.  This article explains why this might occur.

Background

Some browsers, IE in particular, enforce a DNS computer name rule that disallows certain characters (including an underscore) in the name.  If your Ignite PI Server name has one of these characters, IE will block all session cookies, which in turn causes the Ignite web client to not function. 

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909264 for the full list of disallowed characters for DNS computer names.

Example:

http://my_computer_name:8123 <= underscores in name, so session cookies are blocked !!
http://mycomputername:8123 <= ok
http://<ip address>:8123 <= ok

Solutions

If you have a disallowed character in your Ignite PI Server's machine name, there are several possible solutions:

1. Use the IP address instead.
    
2. Use a browser that does not enforce the naming rule (e.g. Firefox).
    
3. If you are using the browser on the Ignite PI Server machine, you can specify "localhost" instead of the machine name.
    
4. Map the Ignite PI Server's machine name to a valid name.  This is done on your client machine.  On Windows, this is done by adding an entry in the "hosts" file (typically in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\).
    
5. Change the Ignite PI Server's machine name to have only allowed characters.