[Forum] Cannot Login to Admin CP

[John De Herrera]

Whenever I click to go to my admin cp, I get the popup asking me to log in again. The username and password are not being accepted.

[Loco.M]

Should your user be able to access the admincp?
Have you changed the cookie settings lately?

[John De Herrera]

We have not changed anything however someone else did the installation for us.

[web_connect]

Are you running memcached? And what version of vBulletin are you using?

[Troy Roberts]

Can you login to the forums as a regular user? Is everything else working properly?

[HMBeaty]

There's always the "Forgot your password?"

[John De Herrera]

As a regular user, yes, we can, but now, nobody but one person can log into the admin cp from any other machine.

[Troy Roberts]

Is your password/username being accepted and then moving on the the "Thanks for logging in" screen? Then taking you back to the login screen?

I was just messing around with putting in a wrong password when logging in to the admin cp. After putting in a wrong password on the first attempt and then the correct one on the second attempt, I ran into the problem as I just described. My username/password was accepted and the "Thanks for logging in" screen was displayed. Then it went back to the login screen. I couldn't login. I closed that browser window, opened a new one, and the problem went away.

Can you try that to see if it makes a difference?

[John De Herrera]

Is your password/username being accepted and then moving on the the "Thanks for logging in" screen? Then taking you back to the login screen?

I was just messing around with putting in a wrong password when logging in to the admin cp. After putting in a wrong password on the first attempt and then the correct one on the second attempt, I ran into the problem as I just described. My username/password was accepted and the "Thanks for logging in" screen was displayed. Then it went back to the login screen. I couldn't login. I closed that browser window, opened a new one, and the problem went away.

Can you try that to see if it makes a difference?

Let me give it a try.

[John De Herrera]

Still no luck. This one has me frazzled quite a bit. I cleared my browser cache and cookies and still no luck. Wondering if IP addresses have anything to do with this. I am not the one that installed this as I am working for John on getting this up. Basically, I need to know if there is anything that needs to be done in the config file or anything, because even if I call the admin cp directly, it brings a popup window instead of the direct login screen as shown in the documentation.

[web_connect]

Again, are you using memcached or any other caching engine. What version of vBulletin are you using?

[John De Herrera]

version 4.1 is the version in use. on my machine, the only caching that is done is in my browser.

[Wayne Luke]

Only two reason would cause it to loop back to the login screen. 1) The cookies on the site are invalid. 2) The user does not have administrator permission.

1) Please reset your cookie path and cookie domain variables. These should not be set unless you have multiple vBulletin installations on the same domain name. You can reset these using tools.php.

Follow these steps.

- Upload tools.php from your "do_not_upload" folder. This should go into your admincp directory.

- Load this in your browser by going to: yourforums/admincp/tools.php

- Enter your customer ID.

- Click on Reset Cookie Path and Reset Cookie Domain.

- Delete tools.php from your server.

- See if you can login.


2) Here are the instructions on how to restore an admin account for when you cannot access the old admin account, have lost the password, got hacked, or you can't receive the lost password email from http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN.com/YOUR-FORU....php?do=lostpw

Note: Change that link to your forum URL of course.

Browse to your forum and log out if you aren't already. Register as a new user and login as this user.

In the vBulletin's .zip file you can find a directory called 'do_not_upload/'. Inside this directory is a file called 'tools.php'. Upload this file into your forum's admincp/ directory.

Then go to the admincp/tools.php with your browser.

At the bottom of the tools page is an option to 'Reset Admin Access'. Run it with the just newly registered username.

You have just made yourself admin. And you need this because you should now login to the admincp/ and find the user who's password you've lost. Search for this user and when found you will see the whole profile. Including a password field.

Set a new password.

Go to the main forum and log out as the new user, and try to login with the old admin account. This should work now. If it does not work contact vBulletin Support again.

When it works, go back into the admin control panel and find the newly registered user. The profile page will have a dropdown in the top, from there select delete and delete the temporary admin.

Then delete the tools.php file. It is a potential security risk if you leave it on-line.

[John De Herrera]

Only two reason would cause it to loop back to the login screen. 1) The cookies on the site are invalid. 2) The user does not have administrator permission.

1) Please reset your cookie path and cookie domain variables. These should not be set unless you have multiple vBulletin installations on the same domain name. You can reset these using tools.php.

Follow these steps.

- Upload tools.php from your "do_not_upload" folder. This should go into your admincp directory.

- Load this in your browser by going to: yourforums/admincp/tools.php

- Enter your customer ID.

- Click on Reset Cookie Path and Reset Cookie Domain.

- Delete tools.php from your server.

- See if you can login.


2) Here are the instructions on how to restore an admin account for when you cannot access the old admin account, have lost the password, got hacked, or you can't receive the lost password email from http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN.com/YOUR-FORU....php?do=lostpw

Note: Change that link to your forum URL of course.

Browse to your forum and log out if you aren't already. Register as a new user and login as this user.

In the vBulletin's .zip file you can find a directory called 'do_not_upload/'. Inside this directory is a file called 'tools.php'. Upload this file into your forum's admincp/ directory.

Then go to the admincp/tools.php with your browser.

At the bottom of the tools page is an option to 'Reset Admin Access'. Run it with the just newly registered username.

You have just made yourself admin. And you need this because you should now login to the admincp/ and find the user who's password you've lost. Search for this user and when found you will see the whole profile. Including a password field.

Set a new password.

Go to the main forum and log out as the new user, and try to login with the old admin account. This should work now. If it does not work contact vBulletin Support again.

When it works, go back into the admin control panel and find the newly registered user. The profile page will have a dropdown in the top, from there select delete and delete the temporary admin.

Then delete the tools.php file. It is a potential security risk if you leave it on-line.

I cannot run the tools.php file without getting the popup. Is this a permissions issue or a username from the host issue? What should I put in the popup window to login?

[Wayne Luke]

If there is a popup, then someone added an .htaccess user there. I can't tell you what to enter there. Contact your host and have them remove it for now. We do recommend adding this for security but the person who adds it should give everyone the username and password or create username/password combos for each person who needs it.