Mac mismatch - possible timezone issue?

[mattheworiordan]

A customer, when using the following auth code, gets "Request mac does not match"

$subscriberClient = new \Ably\AblyRest(array(
  'key' => $this->subscribeApiKey
));
$tokenDetails = $subscriberClient->auth->requestToken(array(), array(
  'queryTime' => false
));

However, when changing queryTime to true, the error goes away.

$subscriberClient = new \Ably\AblyRest(array(
  'key' => $this->subscribeApiKey
));
$tokenDetails = $subscriberClient->auth->requestToken(array(), array(
  'queryTime' => true
));

I checked with the customer, and it seems their local time was within at most a second of the actual time, so I suspect this could be a timezone issue. They are in France, so GMT +1.

I asked them to do the following:

In one console, do:
php -a
echo microtime(true);
and then in another window, at around the same time! do the following:
$ curl rest.ably.io/time
What is the difference in values ignoring the part of the decimal

Customer:
PHP : 1455545827.01
CURL : 1455545827562

[mattheworiordan]

From @bladeSk on the issue:

Hmm, I can't get it not to work. I'm in the same time zone and tried both Windows and a Debian server.
So in order to understand what's going on with the hmac generation, I think we'll need to see the "signText". The easiest way of dumping that is putting var_dump($signText); here https://github.com/ably/ably-php/blob/master/src/Auth.php#L320
It could possibly have something to do with a 32 bit version of PHP. Although I can't imagine why they'd have that.

[frankie567]

Hi there,

I'm the customer in question, from ProTournoi. Here is the result of the var_dump($signText); :
string(67) "llk17g.ICsvtg 1.4556315941E+12 057429a11d26f71da9e02bb063f17e1c "

Regards !

[bladeSk]

Ah, I see what the problem is. The timestamp got converted to float and printed with exponent, which is obviously a very different string than you'd get by printing an integer.
@frankie567 Could you please check what version of PHP you are running by running this from your shell?
php -r "echo PHP_VERSION.' '.PHP_OS.' '.(PHP_INT_SIZE*8).'bit '.PHP_INT_MAX;"

[frankie567]

Here it is :
5.6.10 Darwin 64bit 9223372036854775807

[bladeSk]

Thanks. This looks like incosistency with PHP's handling of large (>2^31) numbers across platforms. I should have a fix ready tomorrow.

[mattheworiordan]

Thanks @bladeSk

[bladeSk]

Fixed here #28