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admin login failing yet everything "seems" set ok

MartinHansell Member
in General support
Hi,

I am unable to login as admin (the link is even missing on my home page). When I try I get
There was an error logging in. Check your username and password and try again.

Through phpMyAdmin I have altered my username back to admin, and the password to 1234 (based on another post I read) using the ...SET password = MD5(1234) where id = 1, but thus far have still failed to get into the system. [Does the system use md5 encryption?]

But it is working fine for browsing... strange huh?

Anyone able to point me in the right direction?
Thanks
Martin

Comments

  • sbillard Member
    You cannot directly set passwords since they are stored as encrypted strings. So your mysql setting will cause it to be impossible for you to log in. Delete the rows of your administrator table and you will get the new install set user/password screen when you visit admin.

    As for browsing, no login is needed normally to view a site.
  • MartinHansell Member
    Thanks for your response... I have tried that and it has had no effect.

    What are the other possible causes?

    Permissions? I have them all set to www-data...
    MySQL - if I can browse the photos there should be nothing wrong with the data connection?
    Ah.... found it... I had not set the setting to true in this line of zp-config.php

    // If this is a new Zenphoto install, change the following to from 'false' to 'true'
    $conf['UTF-8'] = true;

    Thanks for a great piece of software!
    Martin
  • sbillard Member
    That fixed the login?
  • MartinHansell Member
    Yep...

    I migrated from Windows to Linux a little while back... but the setting in zp-config.php was "false" under Windows. Not sure why it should require this on a Linux box, but hey!

    Maybe I changed my MySQL installation and configuration to being utf8 when I switched to Linux (it was a while back and becoming a Linux user is all a bit of a blur) hence maybe I was unable to read the data in it without having the setting as "true".

    If you get any ideas it would be good to know for general future use.
    Thanks again.
    Martin
  • sbillard Member
    Do you have accented characters in your user ID? that is the only thing this should impact.
  • staz Member
    I just installed zenphoto for the first time and after all of that, I am now unable to login as admin as well. I get the same error as Martin:

    "There was an error logging in. Check your username and password and try again."

    I am positive I'm using the correct username/password because I just set it up five minutes earlier. This is very confusing. Any ideas as to why I suddenly can't login after just setting up zenphoto?
    website: http://eye.brazenzen.org
  • sbillard Member
    Were you ever able to log in? Does the password reset work. (See the troubleshooting guide.)
  • staz Member
    No, I was never able to log in and it still does not work. I checked the troubleshooting guide, but I am unsure where the "Administrators table" is. What file can that be found in exactly?
  • staz Member
    Okay, I found the correct file. However, the Administrators table is not there and as best I can tell, there are no "adminuser" or "adminpass" in the Options table. Still, when I run setup, it continues to tell me the username/password are incorrect. I still have not received an email allowing me to reset the username/password either.
  • sbillard Member
    You do have a `zp_administrators` table. That is where the administrator info is stored and is the table the troubleshooting guide tells you to delete. It is normal not to have the admin records in the options table if you did not ever install a version of zenphoto from before the multiple admins change.

    Did the login form say it sent the reset e-mail?
  • staz Member
    No, the login form tells me nothing but "There was an error logging in. Check your username and password and try again." I've even tried using the username/password listed in PHPmyadmin and still nothing. I just continually receive the same error message no matter what. I've only given zenphoto one email address (which it shows in the captcha on the login page) and have yet to receive a reset email. To be clear, this all started immediately after the initial zenphoto setup. I've not yet been able to login to zenphoto at all.
  • sbillard Member
    How was Zenphoto installed? By uploading the files and running setup.php or via some 'quick install' script? The only times we have had this sort of problem is with things like simplescripts.

    Anyway, what you will need to do is delete the zp_administrators table then run the setup program. This will start you clean where you will provide a username and password for Zenphoto. These are NOT the same thing as your MySQL credentials.
  • staz Member
    I uploaded the files and ran setup.php. There was no "quick install" script. I am trying to delete zp_administrators table, but I am not finding it in any files. What file is it in exactly?
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    `zp_administrators` table is in your MySQL database. When mentioning "quick install" sbillard was referring to something like SimpleScripts that some hosts provide to install applications. We don't support these.
  • staz Member
    Thank you! Just deleted the zp_administrators table and that worked! Yay, I'm in! But no, I never used a quick install script such as SimpleScripts/Fantastico/etc. I just uploaded the files to my ftp and ran setup.php. Will deleting the zp_administrators table give me any problems in the future or am I safe without it?
  • sbillard Member
    Setup has recreated the table, so you are back on a clean slate.

    You should check with your provider on why you did not get the reset e-mail. Presumably they are not supporting the PHP mail capability. If this is the case you will also not get comment notification if you have enabled it.

    In the mean time, maybe a post-it note with your user/password would be a good investment:)
  • cleavon Member
    Guys,
    I hhave this same problem. I sent the reset request, got the necessary information but I still get the error message when logging in . I used simple scripts to set up my stuff.
  • sbillard Member
    Sorry, simplescripts seems to be a problem for passwords. You need to contact the simplescript people on this. Many threads to this effect on the forum here. Something simplescript is doing is really messing things up.
  • AlanB66 Member
    OK, this is quite annoying. Bear with me, 'cause I can prove this is not an MD5 password ...

    I set up a new user and set their password to: 83mB7tNN
    In my zp_administrators table, the user's encrypted password is: ce44b41a56f5d0524c49ded450e3db0c
    In a shell, when I run md5 -d83mB7tNN, I get: 2967F60F5CB7194F74C942A150D40648

    When I try to use mySQL in my zp_administrators table to alter the password and use the MD5 function against the string '83mB7tNN', I also see the results as: 2967F60F5CB7194F74C942A150D40648

    When I try to log in to my ZenPhoto admin page with this account, it fails.
    When I update zp_administrators with the password 'ce44b41a56f5d0524c49ded450e3db0c' for that user (no function applied during the update command), I can then, once again, log into the ZenPhoto page with password '83mB7tNN'.

    So, the question remains, what is the encryption method for ZenPhoto's zp_administrators' password column?
  • sbillard Member
    But of course, the hash stored is not the md5 of the password, so why should it match?

    Look at the script lib-auth.php for Zenphoto's algorithms.
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