"You cannot Login. There are no administrators set up"

[ashwa]

"You cannot Login. There are no administrators set up". I am running my site since 2 years. Suddenly I got some error and cant enter my admin area. Please help me here and also tell me step by step. Kindly help me.


Thanks
ashwa.

[astgeorge]

hmm wow after 2 years it just did this huh..suspect.

well first what version of Joomla are you running? Also do you have access to the DB? If I can walk you through adding an admin directly to to the DB then you could login and do what you need.

cheers

[ashwa]

Thanks very much.

I am using 1.0.12 and 1.0.13 I have DB and Cpanel. I will PM to you all my Cpanel control, if you agreed. Please reply me as early as possible.


Thanks and Regards.

ashwa

[astgeorge]

well which one is it 1.0.12 or 1.0.13? (not that it really matters, I just want to be sure) Well you wont need to PM me anything really, are you familiar with MySQL? I can walk you through adding the admin account via the DB manually. Wouldn't you rather learn how to do it encase you have to do it again rather then have me just do it for you.

cheers

[ashwa]

Thanks
it is 1.0.12. I am little familiar with DB. No problem tell me I will try to do it. Thanks for your kind co operation.

Ashwa

[astgeorge]

ok well what you are going to want to do is manually insert a record for a user in your DB. You can do this using either a client software on your local machine and connect to the DB (MySQL Administrator) or you can use phpMyAdmin if your web host has it.phpMyAdmin will most likely be the easiest route if you are not familiar with MySQL Administrator. Do you know if your server has phpMyAdmin for you to use?

Cheers

[mcoblentz]

Dear astgeorge:

I have just encountered the same problem. I didn't do anything to the site. I'm running Joomla 1.13, on Linux shared hosting, with MySQL. I have access to the phpMySQL admin interface (well, I hope I do from home - I'm at work and can't access it from here).

So if you can just enumerate the steps for a noobie, that would be wonderful.

This whole problem started with the following:

DB function failed with error number 1226
User 'coblentz_admin' has exceeded the 'max_questions' resource (current value: 50000) SQL=SELECT session_id FROM jos_session WHERE session_id = '93e6cc7d2349101d751940bdae8ebdf7'
SQL =
SELECT session_id
FROM jos_session
WHERE session_id = '93e6cc7d2349101d751940bdae8ebdf7'

and I'm not sure what happened there. Any thoughts? Is this something like a DDoS? This is a simple family website. I don't even have 10 users yet.

Thanks,
Matt

[astgeorge]

Ashwa,

I will post the step by step to inserting an admin user record into the DB manually here, Give me just a bit to write it all out and check back here in a little while.

Matt,
Yours looks like a slightly different problem as you have and admin user (coblentz_admin) that has exceeded the max_questions resource. Here is a link that I think can help you:

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=236&t=11793

cheers

[mcoblentz]

Aaron, thanks for the tip on the other link. I will check it out tonight.

I tried to access the system via the Joomla Admin panel, but it said that there were no administrators, so I thought I had this problem first. I'll check the tables and SEO, etc.; see what's up tonight. Thanks for looking out for us!

Matt

[astgeorge]

How to edit or manually add a user record to the jos_users table of your Joomla 1.0.x MySQL database using phpMyAdmin.

This tutorial assumes you left the default table prefix jos when you installed Joomla.

Step 1. Accessing the jos_users table

Open a phpMyAdmin Connection to the Joomla DB that you want to add the record to. Once you can see all the tables browse down to the jos_users table. Click the 'browse' icon highlighted with the red box in figure 1. This will take you to the records for the jos_users table.

Figure 1


Once in the records view you will either see no rows and no records or you will see rows with existing user records.
See Figure 2.

Figure 2


IMPORTANT - If you want to add a new record then proceed through step 2 and skip step 3 . If you want to edit an existing record then skip step 2 and proceed directly to step 3.

Step 2. So you want to add a new row and record huh?

From the jos_table users view (Figure 2) you will notice a menu at the top of your phpMyAdmin window. Figure 3 Click the insert button and it will take you to a screen where you can insert values for each field of the new user record. See Figure 4 below.

Figure 3


Reference the key at the end of this tutorial for the values need in figure 4. Use the temporary hash password below for your new user record. This hashed password is really 123456. Note: Make sure and change this user password from the admin panel when we you have finished this tutorial.

Code: Select all

ca68aadac1a934b44dcf6990f303beb8:G87QkRsKJTnw6DWM

When you have entered in the right values from the key hit the go button and save the record.

Figure 4


Step 3. Making changes to an the existing record

If you skipped step 2 you will still be at the jos_users records view. From here click the pencil icon (Edit) to access the values for a specific row. See Figure 5

Figure 5


Clicking the pencil icon will take you a screen where you can input new values or edit existing values for a user record. See figure 4 above. You can alter these records as you wish but make sure to reference the key at the end of this tutorial to better understand each value and its correlated meaning within the Joomla DB structure.

If you want to change a user password from the DB go here http://gtools.org/tool/md5-hash-generator/ , plug in your data (password) and hit go. This will give you a MD5 hash value to swap into the password field.

THE FIELDS AND THEIR VALUES KEY:
id = the integer number value for the user record
name = the name of the user
username = the login username for the record
password = an MD5 hashed value of the users password (with the salt for added security)
usertype = User group access (eg Super Administrator, Administrator, Registered)
block = 0 to not block the user 1 to block them from the site
sendEmail = 1 if they are to receive administrative emails from the site 0 if they are not allowed
gid = Group access ID (eg 25 = Super Administrator, this will need to align with the usertype you entered)
registerDate = Date of which the user registered on the site (click the calander and add a date / time)
lastvisitDate = Date user last visited the site (leave all zeros, will be populated by system when user logs in)
activation = leave empty this is a record for if you have activation email set in Site Global Config
params = also leave empty will be filled by system when user logs in, or when you set the user editor.

Last but not least go to your admin panel login, authenticate with the newly created user or the edited existing user and all should be well.

I hope this will be useful for you.

cheers

[mcoblentz]

Aaron, that's a great tutorial and a great posting. Thanks.

One question, when I run 123456 through the MD5 Hash generator, I get: "3c0642f3041d709bb3925ae996c48112", which doesn't match yours. Also, all the password hashes have a colon in them. Can you say what's going on there?

Matt

[astgeorge]

Yah here is the scoop. MD5 hash is a one way encryption that is relatively secure by itself but has vulnerabilities. The reason you are not seeing the same output is that to add a further level of security Joomla adds what is know as a salt to the password string before it goes through the MD5 encryption. Are you familiar with this method? If not its the best way to make stored encrypted data even MORE secure! Ultimately it appends some random data on top of the password string, this random data is called the salt. Check out the wikipedia entry on MD5 and look carefully at the vulnerability and applications section as it gives a brief description of using a salt.

Also there is a vulnerability to MD5 that is more commonly know as 'rainbow tables' (online libraries of hash encryptions) that are used to crack or reverse look up MD5 hash encryptions, as you can imagine this is a very a real threat so adding a salt does well to eliminate the use of such libraries.

Also some applications use what is called key strengthening where you implement the hash and salt encryption more then once to add another level of security. Here is the wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5

If you are really interested in encryption & cryptography send me a PM and I can give you some more resources. Thanks for bringing this up as it is a great question I will modify my tutorial to explain this.

cheers

[ashwa]

Thanks very much for your great reply.

I am trying as per your guidance, unfortunately I am missing jos_users and some more columns in my database. Please find attached JPEG file.

Thanks

[astgeorge]

oh no! that is not good, the entire jos_users table has been removed?!?!

I fear something more serious might have happened to your Joomla Database, especially if there are more tables missing then jos_users. Is this a site that is in production like with people using it or is it still in development? Is this on a web server or your local machine? Have you made back ups of the database? If its on a web server companies machine that you can see if they have a backup from before this happened, and restore the entire DB from there.

cheers

[ashwa]

Thanks

This is on web server.
I done back up once and restored. After that its happened like that

[pe7er]

Make sure that besides jos_users you will need the tables:
jos_core_acl_aro
jos_core_acl_groups_aro_map
as well! These are all needed for managing the users...

Some SQL queries to find the missing info:
http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=137296#p679956

[xplosiv]

Hi everyone. I think that my problem is extremely similar to the ones explained in the steps.

However, the PhpMyAdmin panel gives me the following error every time I try to insert or edit the string.
"
Error

SQL query: Edit

SHOW INDEX FROM `jos_users` ;

MySQL said: Documentation
#130 - Incorrect file format 'jos_users'
"

Also, this happened to me about 2 days ago for no apparent reason!

thank you in advance.

[astgeorge]

So when you try and add the table for jos_users it gives you that error ?

[alvarocesar]

Hello...
I need to take off a padlock simble for a name of component od manege.
Can you help me?
Alvaro