Session creates new session id on every page load

[eluser]phanku[/eluser]
I also have this issue.
I have been up and down this thread and tried everything to make this work.
I am planning on using CodeIgniter for a huge project and currently am only doing a small project, before I begin working on the large project, to identify possible issues.
As it stands one issue I have identified is CodeIgniter’s session handler.
Currently I am using a small Linux box that is behind a router that redirects the connections to the Linux box via port forwarding to port 80. I am using a DDYNS to access the box on the port number 8080.
The Apache service on the Linux box listens on port 80.
My CI instance is hosted in a directory of /ci.

Now for sake of ease I will include all the information about my server and settings here.

Config.php:

Code:

$config['base_url'] = '';
$config['sess_cookie_name']  = 'CIPSSSERVER';
$config['sess_expiration']  = 7200;
$config['sess_expire_on_close'] = FALSE;
$config['sess_encrypt_cookie'] = FALSE;
$config['sess_use_database'] = TRUE;
$config['sess_table_name']  = 'ci_sessions';
$config['sess_match_ip']  = FALSE;
$config['sess_match_useragent'] = FALSE;
$config['sess_time_to_update'] = 7200;

$config['cookie_prefix'] = "";
$config['cookie_domain'] = ".kicks-ass.org";
$config['cookie_path']  = "/ci";
$config['cookie_secure'] = FALSE;

.htaccess file in /ci directory:

Code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/webdav
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images)
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /ci/index.php/$1 [L]

Apache config:

Code:

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
   DocumentRoot /var/www
   <Directory />
      Options FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride None
   </Directory>
   <Directory /var/www/>
      Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
      #AllowOverride All
      AllowOverride FileInfo Limit AuthConfig Options
      #AllowOverride FileInfo
      Order allow,deny
      allow from all
   </Directory>
...
</VirtualHost>

Server Variables on request:

Code:

[REDIRECT_STATUS] => 200
    [HTTP_HOST] => <omitted>.kicks-ass.org:8080
    [HTTP_CONNECTION] => keep-alive
    [HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL] => max-age=0
    [HTTP_ACCEPT] => text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
    [HTTP_USER_AGENT] => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.64 Safari/537.31
    [HTTP_DNT] => 1
    [HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING] => gzip,deflate,sdch
    [HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE] => en-US,en;q=0.8
    [HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET] => ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
    [HTTP_COOKIE] => CIPSSSERVER=a:4:{s:10:"session_id";s:32:"6fb2b31c3092c145d261be11f8cf7e7d";s:10:"ip_address";s:14:"<omitted>";s:10:"user_agent";s:108:"Mozilla/5.0+(Windows+NT+6.1;+WOW64)+AppleWebKit/537.31+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Chrome/26.0.1410.64+Safari/537.31";s:13:"last_activity";i:1366654078;}c1c63d93529d3562c2fb4eb3e37ff56c
    [PATH] => /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
    [SERVER_SIGNATURE] =>
Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu) Server at <omitted>.kicks-ass.org Port 8080
    [SERVER_SOFTWARE] => Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu)
    [SERVER_NAME] => <omitted>.kicks-ass.org
    [SERVER_ADDR] => 192.168.1.102
    [SERVER_PORT] => 8080
    [REMOTE_ADDR] => <omitted>
    [DOCUMENT_ROOT] => /var/www
    [SERVER_ADMIN] => webmaster@localhost
    [SCRIPT_FILENAME] => /var/www/ci/index.php
    [REMOTE_PORT] => 57533
    [REDIRECT_URL] => /ci/
    [GATEWAY_INTERFACE] => CGI/1.1
    [SERVER_PROTOCOL] => HTTP/1.1
    [REQUEST_METHOD] => GET
    [QUERY_STRING] =>
    [REQUEST_URI] => /ci/
    [SCRIPT_NAME] => /ci/index.php
    [PATH_INFO] => /
    [PATH_TRANSLATED] => /var/www/index.php
    [PHP_SELF] => /ci/index.php/
    [REQUEST_TIME] => 1366654079

ci_session table:

Code:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `ci_sessions` (
  `session_id` varchar(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `ip_address` varchar(45) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `user_agent` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `last_activity` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `user_data` text NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`session_id`),
  KEY `last_activity_idx` (`last_activity`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

I have omitted parts of the address for security reasons.

As you can see that the client is sending the cookie information and yet CI is not reading it into the session data. It also, on every page refresh, creates a new session.

Any assistance would be very appreciated. Thank you.