admin stopped working

Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2014 10:05 pm

Hi All...
I've got this RN2.4 site and suddenly admin can't do anything. It looks like admin can login, but as soon as admin tries to click on anything they are kicked out back to the admin login screen. First thought was cookies, but after clearing cookies and getting the same behavior with two different admins over three different computers and four different browsers ...

I cleared all the banned and session stuff with phpmyadmin, still no luck.
This might have started happening when the server mysql was updated to 5.5 a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure. However, there isn't a problem on other RN sites, so I'm baffled.

Then I looked at the error log and found this ...

[21-Apr-2014 20:44:14 America/Los_Angeles] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxxxx/public_html/admin.php:1) in /home/xxxxx/public_html/modules/Your_Account/includes/mainfileend.php on line 96
[21-Apr-2014 20:44:14 America/Los_Angeles] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxxxx/public_html/admin.php:1) in /home/xxxxx/public_html/modules/Your_Account/includes/mainfileend.php on line 97
[21-Apr-2014 20:44:14 America/Los_Angeles] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxxxx/public_html/admin.php:1) in /home/xxxxx/public_html/modules/Your_Account/includes/mainfileend.php on line 98
[21-Apr-2014 20:44:14 America/Los_Angeles] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxxxx/public_html/admin.php:1) in /home/xxxxx/public_html/modules/Your_Account/includes/mainfileend.php on line 99
[21-Apr-2014 20:44:14 America/Los_Angeles] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxxxx/public_html/admin.php:1) in /home/xxxxx/public_html/mainfile.php on line 304
[21-Apr-2014 20:44:14 America/Los_Angeles] PHP Warning: session_start() [<a href='function.session-start'>function.session-start</a>]: Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /home/xxxxx/public_html/admin.php:1) in /home/xxxxx/public_html/includes/csrf-magic.php on line 420
[21-Apr-2014 20:44:14 America/Los_Angeles] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxxxx/public_html/admin.php:1) in /home/xxxxx/public_html/admin.php on line 115
[21-Apr-2014 20:44:14 America/Los_Angeles] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxxxx/public_html/admin.php:1) in /home/xxxxx/public_html/includes/mimetype.php on line 89
[21-Apr-2014 20:44:14 America/Los_Angeles] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxxxx/public_html/admin.php:1) in /home/xxxxx/public_html/includes/mimetype.php on line 91
[21-Apr-2014 20:44:14 America/Los_Angeles] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxxxx/public_html/admin.php:1) in Unknown on line 0
[21-Apr-2014 20:44:14 America/Los_Angeles] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxxxx/public_html/admin.php:1) in Unknown on line 0

Any clues?

Thanks for your help.

Hugs all round.

registered · Site Admin Joined: Aug 22, 2007 Posts: 1775

Maybe HTML code has been inserted incorrectly. If the HTML code has been set for the start of the sessions before the start of the PHP code, that would be an explanation. The owner of the page will have changed maybe a core file which generates exactly this error. Ask him, according to his last changes.

Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2014 9:44 am

Exactly .... I had a look at the root dir and sure enough there was an admin.php.old and an admin.php with a date of April 14. I switched them out and everything is now working fine.
I'm going to have to wrap the knuckles of someone ... just not sure who.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2014 10:10 am

I had a look at the two files and it seems the admin was attempting to increase the number of stories displayed on the administration page. A nice thought for sure, and it worked for them ... but broke the site for the next admin to login.

The line that was changed was:
$result6 = $db->sql_query('SELECT sid, aid, title, time, topic, informant, alanguage, topicname FROM '.$prefix.'_stories left join ' .$prefix.'_topics ON topicid=topic '. $queryalang.' ORDER BY time DESC LIMIT 0,50');

to:

$result6 = $db->sql_query('SELECT sid, aid, title, time, topic, informant, alanguage, topicname FROM '.$prefix.'_stories left join ' .$prefix.'_topics ON topicid=topic '. $queryalang.' ORDER BY time DESC LIMIT 0,500');

So there it is.

Was that number too high?

Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2014 3:01 pm

I don't believe that should be the reason, because this query is started after all other core-stuff!

In the download package the LIMIT is 0,20. It counts only the last 20 entries of the db-table. A limit of 500 is also possible but it would need only more loading time - not really a good practice but this can not be the reason for your issue.

Try to compare both files.

registered · Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2014 3:22 pm

It could be extra lines after the closing ?> tag.