Admin access

[LeeM]

Hey guys,

sorry for yet another noobs question, but I'm struggling to login to admin, is a newly setup forum, I'm the only user and I'm logged in however when I visit /admin I receive the error message;

Access Denied
You seem to have stumbled upon a page that you do not have access to.

I was under the impression that the first user was granted automatic admin access.

Cheers, Lee

[LeeM]

@a_5mith thought that I have locked myself out of admin somehow, and advised that I use the following;

redis-cli DEL lockout:1 in your nodebb folder.

Sadly this had no affect, indeed the only changes I made after install were to change the passwords for both users.

a_5smith did say this;

"I've put you on latest master, it seems stable enough on my forum, but if you run into any bugs, it'll likely be a Master thing." Maybe that's what's wrong?

[LeeM]

This is becoming very frustrating, have a great looking forum that is next to useless unless I can modify it to suit my needs. I've spent hours looking for clues at these forums, I've searched Google for anything similar, and nothing of help there.

I did get some hints from a_5smith

If anything breaks, there's a few reset commands that you can use if needs be. So if installing a plugin stops nodebb loading, disabling that plugin will usually fix it etc.

Lets not forget I am a noob ....

Does anyone know what the reset commands are? And how do I disable a plugin, or discern which plugins (if any) need disabling.

Also a_5mith mentioned;

Try redis-cli DEL lockout:1 in your "nodebb" folder

As mentioned in my previous post this didn't help, but I was able to locate a noobs guide on common ssh commands (for any other noobs in the future), as I've been unable to locate the nodebb folder, and when I use cd nodebb it reports "no such file or directory"

ls also doesn't work, or it might, it just doesn't list any folders other than root?

[LeeM]

Ah ........ Now this is interesting it seems that folders are only viewable by specific users, the root user is unable to see the nodebb folder, so you need to login as the other user (i.e. the user that created the folder) - wow this is a lot more different that I ever imagined.

So ok I tried "redis-cli DEL lockout:1" and it still doesn't work.

Now that I have access to the nodebb folder I tried - ./nodebb reset all - and that doesn't work either, still no access to admin!

[jarey]

@LeeM here in the docs: https://docs.nodebb.org/en/latest/plugins/create.html you have how to disable any plugin you want to (normally you would like to disable via command line those plugins that are causing errors on your nodebb installation when starting it up).

Regards.

[LeeM]

@josé-ángel-rey-liñares

I reset all of them and sadly it makes no difference

But thanks for the info I've saved that doc, will no doubt become useful later in the process, which at this rate will be sometime next year

[jarey]

@LeeM i suffered your problem when making my first fresh install, since the first user is the one having admin privileges. So if the installation fails and you try to install it again, and the user has been created, you fall into this issue. I solved it, flushing the redis DB i was using and installing again.
Hope it can be usefull to you.

Regards.

[LeeM]

hahahahahah I am a complete F***tard! lol

See this is what happens when you fail to comprehend how the system works, I misunderstood what @a_5smith was telling me, he said login as Lee? and I was like "how can I, that member doesn't exist", but when I tried I was able to login as admin, what a very strange system this is.

The issue stems from still looking at Nodebb from the perspective of how phpbb, vanilla and vbulletin etc work i.e. the admin user can access both front and back of the system, Nodebb doesn't work like that, you access your forum front pages as a regular member and the admin area as the member you created using Putty. lmao!

Well hopefully this will help a few other noob users.

[jarey]

@LeeM umm not really, with an admin user you should be able to navigate throught the forum and throught the admin panel.

[julian]

NodeBB has no concept of what the shell users are (though hey, that's a neat idea... maybe I could make a plugin for that, but I digress...), so if your login to NodeBB is the same as your PuTTY credentials to log into your digital ocean server, then you just happened to use the same username and password for both

[a_5mith]

I set them up as the same credentials for both for testing and ease of use. In production you'd use different logins for putty and your forum. Your forum user will have admin credentials applied. Sorry for the confusion. If you're still having issues. Send me a chat message and I'll look when I get in.