[rt-users] Login fails after reinstall of RT 3.4.4

[Scott Courtney]

Good evening, all

Preface: I'm probably doing something stupid. I've been an RT user for several
years, but only recently started administering. OTOH, I have been all over the
list archives, "RT Essentials", and Google, looking for a solution to this, and
I'm stumped.

I had a perfectly good, working installation of RT 3.4.4 under Perl 5.8.5-12 on
RHEL 4. I did a routine security update (via "up2date") of Perl itself, from
5.8.5-12 to 5.8.5-16, and this blasted my RT installation.

I've spent the last two days figuring out what went wrong, have reinstalled
RT, reinvented the wheel of getting Mason to find its documents (I'll bet you
all are sick of seeing *that* question in the list). Ironically, when I solved
that one before, I carefully documented what I had done...in RT. Ouch. Next
time I'll print that ticket out. {GRIN}

Anyway, after about 10 hours of work, I'm back to the point of having RT up
and running as far as the login screen, but I can't login. That's where I'm
stuck.

I have verified that cookies are enabled in my browser for this domain, and
that RT is able to access the database for both read and update. I have
two known-good userids, and I've checked that the MD5 password in the Users
table matches the MD5 of what I thought was the password. I have verified
that the Mason directory and the session data directory are being written
to by RT, which creates files there. And I've verified that sessions are
being created in the corresponding database table.

There are no errors in the Apache logs. I've tried stopping Apache, flushing
the sessions table and Mason cache files, then restarting Apache.

A search of the archives of this list found that this problem could be caused
by a server's timezone not matching the timezone in the RT_SiteConfig.pm file.
It turns out I had that error, and I've since fixed it by copying my old
site config file back to the $PREFIX/etc/ directory. After doing this, I
repeated the stop-flush_everything-restart sequence (see above). I've also
tried two different browsers, and restarting the browser, and forcing the
browser to delete all cookies.

The only oddity I see is that the sessions table, while it does have rows
for sessions, has nothing in the a_session colum for any of them. Could
this be a clue? If so, to what? I have verified that the times stored in
the sessions table match the time the server reports.

I would appreciate any help with this. It's especially frustrating because
I had a wonderfully working installation, and what I thought would be a
trivial security update to Perl broke it so badly. Is there a good way
to turn up logging verbosity on the authentication process?

Versions:
RT 3.4.4
Perl 5.8.5-16 installed from RHEL 4 RPMs
Apache 2.0.55 built from source
mod_perl 2.0.2 built from source
MySQL 5.0.15  installed from official RPMs

Incidentally, the versions of everything except Perl were all working before
the problem arose, so I can rule out compatibility problems with that new
version of MySQL.

Thanks very much for any suggestions.

Kind regards,

Scott

-- 
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Scott Courtney         | "I don't mind Microsoft making money. I mind them
scott at 4th.com          | having a bad operating system."    -- Linus Torvalds
http://4th.com/        | ("The Rebel Code," NY Times, 21 February 1999)
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