Saved login and password from one machine doesn't work on another

[rans6andrew]

My wife is taking an on line qualification course. Her laptop PC is set up with most of what she needs and logs in to the on-line resources semi automatically. Yesterday she tried to access the on-line course resources from a Samsung tablet which failed dismally. On her laptop, going to the on-line resource page opens a typical log-in dialogue box with her user ID and password ready filled in and visible, hitting enter logs her in and everything is OK. Going to the same webpage on the tablet opens the same log-in dialogue for manual entry of the ID and PW but, when entered it responds with "invalid information" and fails to log-in. It fails in a similar way on my Linux Mint laptop. I made the mistake of clicking the password save option on my Mint laptop before it failed to go in but at least we can see we entered it correctly in the password manager.
Is there any way that her PC is using a different ID and /or PW to the one it autofills in the diaglogue box? Something doesn't stack up.

Help, please....

[MechEngr]

It is possible the software also saved a cookie on the PC to prevent being able to pass the login information around to others to use the same on-line course without paying for it. It is also possible that there is some tiny difference in the user ID or password that is not obvious. To rule that out I would copy/paste the user ID and password to an e-mail and either send it to yourself (herself) and copy/paste that on the tablet or the Linux machine.

[rans6andrew]

Will give it a go. It was only to get a podcast into the tablet so she could play it in the car that we started doing this. In the end we found that it could be played from a USB stick if we went in the other car, so we did that using the laptop that does login.

[Jhieminga]

Unless the password managers sync from device to device, it is certainly possible to mix up the password somehow and have that stored, or have a stored one that is slightly different to what you expect. You can also end up with more than one stored password for that site, something you can check for in the PW manager. But the cookie issue is also a possibility, it could restrict the number of simultaneous logins.

[rans6andrew]

We had considered the possibility of multiple logins being prevented by the host site by logging out and closing down the laptop that works ........
Still no joy on other machines.

[artee]

Originally Posted by rans6andrew

We had considered the possibility of multiple logins being prevented by the host site by logging out and closing down the laptop that works ........
Still no joy on other machines.

Are the details that you're using on the tablet exactly the same as on the PC? Are there any lookalike characters in the password (Il1, oO0, etc.), that can suffer from transcription errors?

[MechEngr]

Originally Posted by rans6andrew

We had considered the possibility of multiple logins being prevented by the host site by logging out and closing down the laptop that works ........
Still no joy on other machines.

The normal login systems work by generating a cookie that is stored on your computer after confirming the ID and password. It doesn't keep track of who is logged in, it asks the browser if there is a cookie at some interval or at each operation. The typical "logged out" automatically system is because the cookie can also be assigned a lifespan and if the cookie is not refreshed from time to time it goes stale and cannot be used.

To go the other way leaves the requirement that the main software tracks who is logged in and where they are logged in from and from there the potential of preventing every user from either logging in or logging out if some part of that software screws up.

What I have seen around the edges is that many education sites seem to really hate their users. Mainly the result of anti-cheating measures that aren't particularly well thought out, rejecting users more readily than they should.

The vendor should be able to explain why there is a problem if you have used the copy/paste method mentioned earlier.