If you've been wondering about my blog...

[jonra01]

I've removed the link to my blog from my sig because I've been locked out of the admin section. This happened after I upgraded my system recently. Whenever I try to log into the admin section it says either my ip or my domain is forbidden to access the page. I can't post or manage comments or the anti-spam features. This is a major pain. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to look into a solution, so the blog is being neglected. The only thing I've been able to do is login to phpmyadmin once in awhile to delete the comment spam. I plan on reinstalling the blog as soon as I can find time. Then I'll restore the posts and comments, if all goes well.

I apologize to anyone who has visited the blog expecting new posts on a regular basis.

[webado]

Oh, bummer! These upgrades are a PITA!

I upgraded one site from Mambo to Joomla (had to, as Mambo was transformed into Joomla) and got a bunch of bugs. The solution was supposed to upgrade further to the latest Joomla. Now it's messed up quite royally with incorrect paths all around.

John, have you tried to repair the database? from Cpanel Manage Databases and also from PhpMyAdmin to repair all tabels in it?

This sort of sounds like problems I once ahd when MySql went to having the default encryptin of passwords set to MD5 whereas the old passwords weren't encrypted that way. This caused passwords not to work any more as they couldn't be decrypted since teh defaults apparently was MD5.

Go find your user id in whatever table it's suppseod to be in in the database in PhpMyAdmin, in and modify the password field usign MD5 - and see if that works.

[jonra01]

Now why didn't I think of that? This is most likely what is causing the problem. I was working on a database problem last night that is related to that. I'll bet my hosting company upgraded mySQL recently and that is what is causing both problems.

I'd already tried repairing the db tables, removed the anti-spam protection, and deleted my .htaccess files. All to no avail. I still get a 403 forbidden message. Too bad it doesn't just say something like invalid password. That would have pointed me in the right direction sooner.

The one I'm working on now was bugging the heck out of me. When I moved it from my test setup on my own system to the dev server it suddenly had problems connecting to the database. I could get it to connect if I put the connection information directly into the connection variable - i.e. mysql_connect("localhost", "myusername","mypassword") but if I put these in an include file (like you're supposed to do for security reasons) and then wrote mysql_connect($host, $usr, $pswrd) it failed to connect on the mysql_select_db($db). What happens is that the include file gets echoed to the screen even though I use @mysql_connect and @mysql_select_db.

I struggled with that for quite awhile and then ran phpinfo to see what version the server was running. It is running mysql 4.1.3 and php 4.4.0 Then I looked online and saw that there were problems with this setup when it came to passwords. The newer versions of mysql use a 16 character password field while the older versions of php use a 25 character field. I haven't had time to fool with it today so I'm not sure exactly how I'll fix this.

Oh well, one more thing to spend my time on. :(

"Later edit" I said the older versions used a 25 character field when it should have been 16. I just checked the password field in the blog admin software and see that it is 32 chars. The weird thing is that I can login as the user, but can't access admin.

[webado]

Look into register_globals - is it on or off? which one do you need?
How about exec?

You may have to supplement your php environment with a php.ini file in the folder where you run the application to define the environment variables the way you need them.

Check the forum for that application for tips - probably this problem has already been found and patched by somebody. It sounds like a very familiar problem when php or mysql upgrades are done to servers.

Changing the admin password in PHPMYADMIN for the admin user may help, as I said.