All uses denied access after theme or language change by admin

[jayscot]

Version 1.4.9 installed by a commercial webservice provider. Easy setup and was running smoothly. I want access by students at a school and so they need to register for access. It worked good and then everyone including me got a message saying that access was blocked. The message was in the same color scheme as the theme (I had used Fruity.) I checked our content fileter and found no reason for blocking and I even explicitly opened the filter for everything from my website URL. Still blocked. I went outside the subnet of the school and tried it on two other subnets and I had perfect access. So checking the error logs I noticed 403s for any request of the fruity graphics. Got me thinking that these terminals behind the firewall were still asking for the theme which was no longer the default as I had changed it to something else. So changed it back to Fruity and went back to the school and immediately I was allowed in. Lesson to me: Don't touch the theme.

Now today I went to the site again and was again blocked. I logged in to the school server as another user and was blocked again when I went to the site. Later I restarted my browser and was allowed in immediately. I got home and noticed that I had received a registration email notification in a foreign language (which I had turned on and off last night)! Another lesson??? Don't touch the language??

So what is the problem? I will get a small graphic of the error screen if it shows up tomorrow. But... Is it some kind of a proxy server problem? We no longer use one. Is it a firewall blockage that stops terminals from requesting a fresh copy of the page and uses a cached copy? I even went to users and terminals that had never ever gone to the site and still I received the old Fruity color and the blocked message. I have received the same errors on Mac and Windows terminals.

[Joachim Müller]

Post the actual error message. A link might help as well.

[jayscot]

Here is the actual error message.
(https://coppermine-gallery.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.telusplanet.net%2Fpublic%2Fjayscott%2Fauction%2Fbanned.jpg&hash=79623d90df08b146a1743edd1516fd922c2df53b)

And, here is what I think fixed the problem...

It happened again. This time at home. So why? I had created a test user to test different access levels in the photo album. But I had forgotten exactly what the password was after a few hours. And suddenly I was banned and could not log in. I then remembered seeing something in the configuration about the number of failed logins before an IP address was banned. So I waited a couple of hours and eventually got in. Upon checking I found the default of 5 failed logins was going to ban my IP address for 10 minutes. Actually the 10 minutes was not accurate as it took more like 100. Anyway I got to thinking that the school was all on one IP address. And I had a link from our school webpage directly to the photo album site. So many students would be going there and wanting to look. Of course they would not have a username but since they are used to logging in to our network with their name, they would try that right away. After 5 failures at that IP address Coppermine would ban the IP. Sure they should have clicked the register button instead but what student reads the instructions first??!!

So I think I may safely say this problem is solved. I have upped the bad tries to 10 in a row before it blocks anyone. Maybe by then the kids will have read my instructions at the top of the page. I actually feel very relieved that this was the problem as I was initially setting the blame to the themes or languages feature. This program works very nicely and it is good to see my troubles were in the way I was using the software not in the software itself.

[Joachim Müller]

Thanks for resolving your issue.

Joachim

P.S. Keyword for search index
You are currently banned from using this site