Can't login to Magento admin

Question

I have magento installed in a subdirectory. www.domain.com/subdir/magento

This site worked perfectly at one point. I changed nothing, until my client said he couldn't login to magento admin.

I logged in just fine from my computer, but on his computer it just redirected back to the magento admin login without an error message and a url that looked goofy like this:

http://domain.com/subdir/magento/index.php/admin/index/index/key/3097210b826ac4a86d7531cb4089c9d0/

I thought that his cookies were being blocked, but that was not the case.

My magento settings were secure/unsecure baseurl: http://domain.com/subdir/magento/

web cookie path: (blank)
web cookie domain: (blank)

After clearing out var/cache, I found that I myself could not login to the admin either, with the same exact issue.

I tried the following settings without luck:

path: /
domain: domain.com

path: /subdir/magento
domain: vigrond.com

I also tried commenting out those lines in Varien.php, but that had no effect either.

My server account is a VPS and it has plenty of free space.

So I'm pretty much lost, wondering why this happened in the first place when it worked before (didn't change anything), and why it's so complicated?

Any help appreciated

Answer 1

I had the same problem, but I was working on XAMPP on windows 7 x64.

In Magento system - configuration - web - session cookie management change Use HTTP Only to no and Cookie Lifetime to 86400.

I only changed the Cookie Lifetime just in case of daylight saving time may not have to be changed.

Before the changes I could only login using Firefox and after the changes all browsers work.

Leave Cookie Path and Cookie Domain blank.

Answer 2

If a login error message ("invalid password", etc.) isn't being displayed it's almost always a session cookie problem. In order to rule it our entirely, use Use your browser's cookie viewer and/or your favorite HTTP traffic sniffer and check

1. That all the cookies have proper expiration dates after being set

2. That the session cookie has a consistent token name/value for each request

3. That PHP, when running through Magento, has the various session lifetime ini settings at a reasonable value

4. That PHP can write to whatever it's using as a cookie storage medium

5. That the server's time matches the real time, and that PHP itself has a timezone set

Answer 3

I was facing the same issue and at the end i found that it was due to full disk space and due to this Magento was not able to create sessions file in the var var/session folder. After cleaning up log files that issue was resolved.

Answer 4

In Case, that you dont see any cookie named "frontend" or "adminhtml", when you reload the page, the Magento cookie wasn't set. In my case I have a wrong cookie_domain. I used "null" instead of "NULL".

As I set my cookie_domain to NULL in core_config_data, the problem was solved

Answer 5

I was fighting with this issue today on my local server. I couldn't login using any browser. I really didn't want to comment out any lines in core files or doing any other "dirty" solutions.

Firstly I checked cookie set by browser. It had expiration set to 1970, so clearly it was a cookie problem.

I checked values for cookies in magento database. In phpmyadmin I found table core_config_data, then fields with values : web/cookie/cookie_domain and web/cookie/cookie_path. They were both blank.

My solution was to set:

web/cookie/cookie_domain to my domain name

and

web/cookie/cookie_path to /.

Example:

your domain where you run magento is magento.local set:

web/cookie/cookie_domain = magento.local

and

web/cookie/cookie_path = /

Answer 6

Did you erase the session storage in var directory?

In my case, when I was playing with autorization for multistore on subdomains (changed path and domain for cookie as you did), this method helped me to drop the "bad" cookie and sucessfuly logined in admin:

In apppath/var/session directory I've made command in shell (be careful with path, this could delete all the files in the directory)

rm -rf /path/to/magento/var/session/*

And then just clean the cookie for domain in browser.