YAALP - Yet another admin login problem

I recently had an issue where I was unable to login to my production Zen Cart 1.3.7 installation. After trying several things I decided to try a fresh install on the same server. This did not help. Thanks in advance!

Slack

Here are the details:

Problem
When attempting to login via the admin/login.php page, the page appears to accept the valid login credentials and then the browser (IE 7) returns an error "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage...". In addition it appears that new users can register, but they are unable to log in.

I have worked through the following tutorials and have not found a resolution.
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=82
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=84
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=281

The current install was done from a 1.3.8a installation .zip downloaded today and using the zc_install folder. No issues were left identified during the installation. The only problems encountered during installation were the typical ones with file permissions.

Environment
Host: 247-host.com
OS: Linux (kernal 2.6.9-67.ELsmp)
PHP: 5.2.3
Apache: 2.0.63
MySQL: 4.1.22-standard

Zen Cart configuration
Zen Cart URL: http://www.pillarcom.com/zen
SSL: off
admin user: kilgore
admin pass: admin (test system, no worries)
user: [email protected]
user pass: password (test system, no worries)
Admin URL: http://www.pillarcom.com/zen/admin/login.php
config files: see attached or
http://www.pillarcom.com/zen/includes/configure.html
http://www.pillarcom.com/zen/admin/includes/configure.html
phpinfo: http://www.pillarcom.com/zen/phpinfo.php
cache folder: world read,write,execute - able (777)

After admin login one gets a blank page. This indicates to me there were some problems with uploading files within the admin dir. Upload just the admin dir. again and see what happens.

And welcome to the forum. :smile:

Website Rob,

Thanks for the welcome. After your message I did the following:

1. Re-downloaded 1.3.8 installation .zip
2. did a Windows "comp" that verified the files were the same
3. Re-uploaded it to my host
4. Did a GNU/Linux "diff" to verify that the files were the same
5. Extracted the .zip and copied the admin directory structure into my Zen folder
6. Attempted to login
   Same results.

Could it be a directory, file ownership issue?

It could be, but all files are owned by my user and are generally world readable/executable, except for the cache which is world readable/writeable/executable. No issues noted by the installer.

Do you have some specific suggestions?

Thanks,

Slack

If you uploaded your files and directories using anyone other than the user (say as superuser root or whatever by using sftp) then the ownership would be that. This would cause that type of error I think. If you did that then you could just use SSH and the chown command.

Sometimes and for various reasons, uploads fail. This includes re-uploading as well.

Once logged into the Admin section I can bypass the 'index.php' and everything works fine.

http://www.pillarcom.com/zen/admin/categories.php

I suggest you delete the current Admin 'index.php' page and upload it again.

No joy. For the sake of being a little different I did the following:

1. Via ssh on my server, I re-downloaded zc 1.3.8a
2. Unzipped the downloaded file into a temporary location
3. deleted admin/index.php
4. copied the admin/index.php from the temp location to production

Thanks,

Slack

Some more information. I discovered the install log and it verifies some of the previous information provided and adds a little:

Sep 20 2008 13:13 -- inspect
System Inspection Results:
------------------------------
NA: Webserver => Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.7a mod_auth_pas
sthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.3
NA: HTTP Host => pillarcom.com
NA: Path_Translated => /home/kilgore/public_html/zen/zc_install/index.php(SCRIPT
_FILENAME)
NA: Real Path => /home/kilgore/public_html/zen
NA: Server Free Disk Space => 110.47 GB
NA: PHP O/S => Linux
NA: PHP API Mode => apache2handler
NA: PHP Max Execution Time per page => 30
OK: Register Globals => OFF
OK: MySQL Support => ON
OK: PHP Version => 5.2.3
OK: PHP Safe Mode => OFF
OK: PHP Sessions Support => ON
OK: PHP Session.AutoStart => OFF
OK: PHP session.use_trans_sid => OFF
OK: Suggested SQL Cache Folder => /home/kilgore/public_html/zen/cache
OK: PHP magic_quotes_runtime setting => OFF
OK: PHP magic_quotes_sybase setting => OFF
OK: PHP GD Support => ON
OK: GD Version => GD bundled (2.0.34 compatible)
OK: PHP ZLIB Compression Support => ON
OK: PHP OpenSSL Support => ON
OK: PHP cURL Support => ON
OK: CURL NON-SSL Capability => Okay
OK: CURL SSL Capability => Okay
OK: PHP Upload Support => ON  upload_max_filesize=2M;  post_max_size=8M
OK: PHP Upload TMP dir =>
NA: PHP include_path => .:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php
NA: PHP SMTP destination => localhost
NA: PHP sendmail path => /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i
NA: PHP sendmail 'from' =>
OK: PHP open_basedir restrictions =>
WARN: PHP Output Buffering (gzip) => OFF
OK: PHP FTP Support => ON
OK: PHP XML Support => ON
OK: PHP Session.Save_Path => /home/kilgore/public_html/zen/cache-->Writeable
OK: includes/configure.php =>  Writeable
OK: admin/includes/configure.php =>  Writeable
OK: cache => OK 777 read/write/execute
OK: images => OK 777 read/write/execute (INCLUDE SUBDIRECTORIES TOO)
OK: includes/languages/english/html_includes => OK 777 read/write (INCLUDE SUBDI
RECTORIES TOO)
OK: media => OK 777 read/write/execute
OK: pub => OK 777 read/write/execute
OK: admin/backups => OK 777 read/write
OK: admin/images/graphs => OK 777 read/write/execute
PHP Extensions compiled: zip, libxml, xsl, xmlwriter, xmlrpc, dom, xmlreader, xm
l, wddx, tokenizer, tidy, session, pcre, SimpleXML, sockets, soap, snmp, SPL, st
andard, Reflection, pspell, posix, mysqli, mysql, mime_magic, mhash, mcrypt, mbs
tring, json, imap, hash, gettext, gd, ftp, filter, exif, dbase, date, curl, ctyp
e, calendar, bz2, bcmath, zlib, openssl, apache2handler, PDO, pdo_sqlite, SQLite
, pdo_mysql, ionCube Loader, Zend Optimizer
------------------------------

I found my issue. In admin/includes/header.php there is the following:

$lines = @file(NEW_VERSION_CHECKUP_URL);

For some reason this is hanging or crashing on my server. I did some testing and for a few minutes it was working when attempting to retrieve a local URL, but even that went away. I am checking with my webhost, but I am not holding my breath.

This is part of a Zen-Cart version check when you log in as an admin. Inititally I commented out this line and that solved my immediate issue. I later changed the following in the "configuration" table as it appears to be a better solution:
SHOW_VERSION_UPDATE_IN_HEADER - false

This can also be changed via the admin login

• Configuration->My Store->Show if version update available
  but if you can't login, then you can't change this :-) It was probably possible to go directly to the URL though I didn't know until after I was done:
• http://yourhost.tld/admin/configuration.php?gID=1

Hope this helps someone else.:clap:

Nice bit of troubleshooting.

Glad to hear things are sorted now and you can move forward on the rest that has to be done. :yes:

This FAQ outlines what to do when your host's configuration won't let Zen Cart check for version updates:
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=81