Cannot Login to nodebb: "Welcome back guest"

[sivy]

I'm running nodebb on Centos8 on a linode.

• NodeBB 1.16.2
• Node v10.21.0
• Redis server v=5.0.3

Recently I upgraded nodebb (I believe to 1.16.1), and lost the ability to log into the forum with Firefox (difficult for the admin). I go to the login form, enter the credentials, click submit, and the forum reloads with /?loggedin=true, and I get a notification:

Obviously I was not logged in as myself. I cleared all cookies, tried multiple times, and could not login. I also had reports of the same behavior from other Firefox users. At some point I saw a message in the log when running ./nodebb dev about a session not matching but I can't reproduce it now.

I could still use Chrome for some reason, so I've been using that to try and debug. Then today I saw that 1.16.2 had been released so I upgraded, hoping that something might be fixed. After upgrading to 1.16.2, I am now unable to login with Chrome - nor Safari - either.

So I'm locked out of the forum, and I cannot figure out what's going on. The only error I've seen in the browser console is a few of these:

GET wss://<site>/socket.io/?EIO=4&transport=websocket&sid=R4V1asZABCvMb9lAAAC with a 400 response.

I'm stumped and frustrated. Any debugging/fixing tips?

--Steve

[PitaJ]

@sivy have you tried a private window? Have you tried a stop, build, start?

[sivy]

@pitaj Hi, yes, I've tried a private window - no difference. I also did multiple stop/rebuild/start cycles as well.

[PitaJ]

@sivy have you tried disabling plugins?

[sivy]

@pitaj Right now I can't, as I cannot login to the forum in any browser I have. is there a CLI-way to do it?

[PitaJ]

@sivy ./nodebb reset -p

[sivy]

@pitaj Thanks, I ran reset -p and then build. No change...

[sivy]

@pitaj I ran ./nodebb reset -a and ./nodebb build, and still no change. I did copy the redis db and /public folder before upgrading earlier, so perhaps I'm in for a re-install. Wish I knew what was going on.

[arnaudw]

Hello @sivy,

I had the same problem.

Using :

• Cloudflare with https rule for forcing https,
• Nginx mainline version has proxy_pass

Solved by changing on Nginx configuration proxy_pass :

proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

To

proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;

Don't understand why it suddently worked with this

[sivy]

@arnaudw said in Cannot Login to nodebb: "Welcome back guest":

proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;

Oh wow I did recently update my nginx config to SSL, I didn't even think to research this. Will try it out!

[sivy]

@arnaudw IT WORKED

Thank you so much. Still figuring things out with nginx, and I don't know that I ever would have figured this out.

[sivy]

mod feel free to close

[arnaudw]

@sivy :)))

If someone have an idea about this, i would love to understand...
I was in https since beggining

[sivy]

@arnaudw I suspect that there was an issue with the proxy messing with how nodebb was interpreting session ids, but I wouldn't know how to be more specific.

[arnaudw]

@sivy Indeed but what ?

[TaLoche]

@arnaudw said in Cannot Login to nodebb: "Welcome back guest":

proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;

Thx a lot @arnaudw. Your workaround really helped me out!

[olsonpm]

arnaudw's solution worked for me, though for apache the command is

RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Proto "https"

Thanks so much for the fix - I also don't understand this, but believe it has to do with a recent update to nodebb since my login was working in v1.16.0 and I updated to v1.16.2

[Bejan]

@arnaudw said in Cannot Login to nodebb: "Welcome back guest":

Solved by changing on Nginx configuration proxy_pass :
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

To
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;

Today I changed the nginx config. Now I use a stream with map and a generic server in nginx.conf (see TLS Termination). This implied removing ssl and http2 from the server's listen directive in sites-enabled/my-site.

So, from:

listen 127.0.0.1:445 deferred ssl http2;

To

listen 127.0.0.1:445 deferred;

That's about my guess why https is required for proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto now.

Thank you for your solution. Saved my day.