Admin sections on forums.

[NWLB]

My account just dipped in and out of being accessable, and with the site now back up and running, none of my message forums are allowing me into my administration pages. They keep looping back to the login page.

Any suggestions as to why that is?

[the_ancient]

Clear Cookies, Clear Cache.... for Starters


What Systems?

[NWLB]

Done that.

Windows XP pro, using Firefox 1.5. I've cleared out all the personal data and such, no such luck so far.

[NWLB]

Nope, tried IE, Opera 8.0, and Firefox, all are having the same issue. The PHP.org community board isn't letting me login with my old account, and the registration forum keeps telling me the confirmation code is wrong.

Yet somebody logged onto my RCIFan.com message board and posted today. And otherwise the forums seem to be working.

[Gwaihir]

You are still accessing them the exact same way?

For example: I visit a board at www.meccg.net/dforum/, which is where the board also thinks it is (i.e. that's on its config pages). However, when I visit the same board by IP, it goes wrong: the board will 'log me on' to the IP address and then redirect me to the URL, for which I then am not logged on yet.

(Note: DON'T go try it with that particular board anymore. I found it confusing for my users, so I wrote a mod_rewrite rule that redirects you well before this happens.)


If it isn't something simple / silly like that, perhaps you can let yourself back in by making an appropriate change in the database through phpMyAdmin?

[NWLB]

OK. IE, Firefox 1.5, Opera 8.0 all didn't work. However Netscape 8.0 did work.

I upgraded Opera and Firefox since the last time the site was up, and never normally used IE prior to that. So it must be some setting within the browsers that is doing it. I'm curious if anybody else has had the same issue.

I was at a families home where I was doing some work on their system, and noted I could access things perfectly well with FF 1.5 but I have their setting different from my own. So I'm going to assume its a setting and things will work fine as soon as I'm done reworking all of it.

[NWLB]

I'm not sure why or what is the issue anymore. Netscape lets me into the system, but I'm unable to get any other browser to work, and I'm getting deeper into a cycle of getting sent back to the login screen on my forums. I can't figure what the issue is since everything worked fine a few weeks ago. Why now is everything having issues.

More perplexing is that the site admin screen shows lots of accounts online, many from my personal IP, which means something is stuck. It makes no sense from what experience I can lend to it.

[Vin DSL]

Sorry for stating the obvious, but the problem is 'obviously' on your end...

I would say it's a Mozilla problem, except that Netscape works. Also, IE is affected as well, so it seems more like an XP problem, at this point.

Have you upgraded XP in the last couple of weeks -- security upgrades, or whatever?

[NWLB]

I just figured it out. In the weeks since I last accessed the site, in addition to upgrading Firefox, I also installed Google's batch of extensions, one of which was their web accelerator. I recalled the software description noted it cached some aspects of webpages to quicken their loading. That was getting around my clearing the caches and cookies. It also explained why Netscape still worked.

File this in the Universal Journal of "Duh."

Sadly this is the first Google toy I couldn't use and enjoy.

[Vin DSL]

I was at a families home where I was doing some work on their system, and noted I could access things perfectly well with FF 1.5...

EDIT: Cool! Ignore the following...

Different ISP, I assume...

I would guess it's either your computer, your OS, or your ISP, based on what you've said here.

Do you have any spare computers laying around? If so, try firing one of them up and see what happens. If everything is okay, then you can rule out your ISP.

[Spathiphyllum]

NWLB,

You figured it out before I saw the thread so, great. I was going to suggest reviewing any proxies/firewalls between your node and the serving node. I have to purge the proxy cache occassionally (I control it and not the ISP since it is outside the ISP's router, i.e. inside my local intranet) to get things to work properly depending on the browser and their idiosyncracies. The headers (of the NPH type and not the meta-headers of HTML) created by the webserver have the most say as to how a page will be cached. The meta- kind may tweak them or override them, but it is up to the particular client to determine how those headers are parsed and followed. Caching-proxies add one extra level of header manipulation in the process and can bugger things up... and it is done transparently so you may or may not know to what extent the headers have been changed on their way from the webserver.

This all has to do with the OSI layers of network presentation some of which is readily apparent and others of which are not.

Anyway, just an FYI.