Topic: Locked out of Web Admin Access

[Richard Bruce]

Hi,

I'm having a "slight" problem  I was setting up a load of new user accounts and groups when suddenly the browser returned the following message :

Authorization Required
This server could not verify that you are authorized to access the document requested. Either you supplied the wrong credentials (e.g., bad password), or your browser doesn't understand how to supply the credentials required.

I can log in both as root and admin on the e-smith box itself, but every time I try to access it via a web-browser I get the above message. The machine has been working fine for the last couple of days (since I set it up) and this appeared "out of the blue". Any suggestions as to where I should start looking or as to what may be the problem?

Richard

[Richard Bruce]

I've also tried re-booting to no avail.

[Peter]

Yes I had the same problem after loading e-smith-isp-0.1-7.noarch.rpm
I had to do an upgrade using the 4.1.1 cd to recover from this.

[Richard Bruce]

I should also have said I'm using 4.1.1 with ppp-2.4.0-9.i386.rpm and appletalk-fixed-0.1-7.i386.rpm patches applied. Hope I don't have to re-install as I can't do a backup at the moment!

Richard

[Richard Bruce]

I've checked the past articles of the forum and have found Charlie Brady's method of resetting a lost password to access the web interface

/usr/bin/htpasswd /etc/httpd/users admin

however in version 4.1.1 the location of the password files is not /etc/httpd/users.

Is this part of a security improvement? Can this method still work, and if so what's the location of the http users password files?

Thanks for any help.

[Richard Bruce]

OK. After some digging about I can tell from the httpd logs exactly when this happened. I seem to have been getting a lot of SIGUSER1 activity from Apache. I'm assuming that this is the result of re-configuring users and groups etc. Is this assumption correct?

 After one particular SIGUSER1 I  then got an AuthExtern pwauth error for user admin, i.e. the admin password was not recognised. Is there anywhere I can check to find out the time and date of the last admin password change (for Apache)? I know I didn't do it, so either it's been corrupted in some way or changed by person unknown. I don't really see how that would be possible given I don't have a fixed external ip address or subscribe to any dynamic DNS services.

So as well as finding out how to reset the admin password within Apache I would also like to try and find out why it happened in the first place, as I don't want it happening when the box goes "live".

Any ideas?

Richard

[Richard Bruce]

Looks like I'll have to lose everything and re-format, but there's no guarantee this won't happen again.  A final appeal for HELP!!!!!  

Richard

[Richard Bruce]

Peter,

I should have listened to you! My apologies. I was able to "get round" this problem by carrying out an "upgrade", even though I already had 4.1.1 installed. Obviously the upgrade program doesn't do any version checking, just saves the important files and sets up a "clean" server. I wish I'd known that 3 days ago! I had to reload a couple of rpm patch files that I had applied to get the system up and running the first time, but I'm not complaining, I've got a working system again! Has anyone else come across this? Is there perhaps a small "bugette" that is causing this

Thanks again.

Richard