Drupal Domain Access Authentication

Question

I am using the domain access module https://drupal.org/project/domain for a city site. They have a lot of sub domains and these work fine for authentication. The users can go to any subdomain fire.#####city.gov/user and are able to login fine.

Now we are using the same access module to share content for another domain entirely ######lovecity.com. You can visit the login page ######lovecity.com/user and try to login. When you do it gives you an access denied. From what we can see the auth token only works for #####city.gov. Any help getting the authentication to work for both domains would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Upon further research I came across this in the readme text:

1.4.1 Logging In To Multiple Domains

The Domain Access module allows the creation of domains with different
hosts.  However, security standards dictate that cookies can only be
read from the issuing domain.

As a result, you may configure your site as follows, but when you do so,
users cannot be logged through a single sign in.

  example.com
  one.example.com
  myexample.com
  thisexample.com

While example.com and one.example.com can share a login cookie, the
other two domains cannot read that cookie.  This is an internet standard,
not a bug.

Note: See the INSTALL.txt for instructions regarding Drupal's default
cookie handling.

This is no a bug like I thought. I am answering it here so that others may learn from the time I spent trying to solve it.