Repeated login problem

[mike.lischke]

Hey there,

until 8 days ago my Lifetype installation worked fine but today I found a strange problem I need help with. I can successfully login to the backend but for any action (other than simply reading my existing postings) I'm brought back to the login page, where I can again successfully login. This will bring me back to the overview page, where the same process starts again if I want to do anything useful there.

I suspected a problem with the browser since I upgraded to FF 4 recently, but also Safari shows the same symptoms and I believe one of our writers (who reported it to me) has IE on her box. So I guess that means it's not the browser. I also tried to repair all tables in the db, just in case, to no avail.

Any help, pointers, hints etc. are welcome to solve this problem.

Thank you,

Mike

[mike.lischke]

Nobody with at least marginal help? That's unfortunate, especially as I have to solve this quickly (as so often). Seems i have to switch to a more reliable solution then.

Mike

[martinh]

Do you host diffrent domains on your webserver? Is it a single webserver or one with an loadbalancer or reverse proxy?

[mike.lischke]

Hey Martin,

thanks for taking the time to reply. The server in question is a multi domain host, though the LifeType installation is just serving a blog like flow of articles into an otherwise hand make website (the only one on this host, all others use Joomla! but not LifeType in any way). My login problem is purely for the backend. I still can read all my previous postings and embed them into my website. And, just to make it clear, this worked until a bit more than a week ago for a long time.

I also thought about a possible hack of the site but I do not see any indications that would be the case. The lifetype installation is simply acting strange and I can for the life of me not find out why.

I can do whatever is necessary on the server to get this up again. I can even directly access any db table, file, whatever. Just need a hint where to look. If that matters: this is a Win 2008 R2 Webserver with IIS7 and PHP as ISAPI module.

Thanks,

Mike

[jondaley]

Was PHP (or any module) recently upgraded?

What version of LifeType are you using?

Are you getting any errors or it is just acting like the session expired?

Perhaps PHP's session directory is having some permission issues? Is there plenty of disk space free on all drives?

[mike.lischke]

Hi jondaley,

thanks for trying to help.

Was PHP (or any module) recently upgraded?

No updates, whatoever.

What version of LifeType are you using?

Since I could not really login I did not know the version (hence it is not set in my profile here), but now I tried harder and found version.php which says I'm on 1.1.6_r4742, which is probably pretty old, since I set this up only for a blog like embedded style.

Are you getting any errors or it is just acting like the session expired?

Things got worse, now that I started testing various things. I cleared the Temp folder of the lifetype installation and explicitely set full permissions for normal users on that box. Not sure if it was already so before I did that (did not test, damn), but now I get a server error 500 if I touch anything from the lifetype installation. So I had to exclude it entirely from the website to not let it drag offline by this problem.

Perhaps PHP's session directory is having some permission issues? Is there plenty of disk space free on all drives?

Yes, enough disk space there. The session dir is empty but I set it to full access for normal users on the box too. No change though.

Mike

[jondaley]

If you look in the server error log, what does it say is causing the 500 error?
My guess would be the permissions on the tmp directory.

[mike.lischke]

That's what I thought too, so I temporarily gave "everyone" full access. However, this did not solve the problem. Actually, I was surprised that I could not easily find which user IIS7 runs under and hence needs to give rights on the websites folders. Finally I found IUSR to be the one that needs proper rights, in particular write access for certain temp folders. The 500 error is probably caused by the fact that I cleand LT's temp folder, assuming it would recreate the structure in it automatically.

But anyway, this was only the finaly reason I needed to finally port this last hand-made website over to a CMS (Joomla! in my case), so this issue is no longer an issue of mine. LT is now out of the game for me.

Thanks anyway,

Mike

[jondaley]

The tmp directory structure is recreated automatically, so that isn't the problem. Good luck with Joomla.