Can see the board, but can't login or register

[akc42]

I set a SMF v2.0RC4 forum up a few days ago.  Yesterday I suddenly found I couldn't post.  In investigating the problem I logged out and now can't log back in and when I try to register as a new member, I get the registration agreement but when I accept it, it returns me to the registration page.

I refreshed (ie uploaded) the entire forum software except Settings.php from a working test forum at home, but that has not changed anything.

I can however see the boards and the topics and posts within them and SSI.php is delivering its output correctly to one of the other pages of my web site, so the database username and password seems to be correct.

I can't find any clues in either the Apache log or the error log table in the database.

Can anyone give me any ideas on how to track this problem down.  I get the feeling (from looking at the code to figure out how, for instance, the registration process and why its not proceeding) that the Session mechanism isn't working quite right, but I don't have experience as to what could be wrong there.

Clues of how to debug this please.

[Illori]

have you tried more then one browser?

[akc42]

have you tried more then one browser?

Yes - I've used Chrome and Iceweasel (Debian's Firefox).  I could try some others. 

What is your thinking behind the question

[Illori]

i thought maybe it was an issue with the browser, do you have any mods installed? anything in your error log?

[akc42]

i thought maybe it was an issue with the browser, do you have any mods installed? anything in your error log?

The only mod is google an I did have some problems in the error log, but they were related to missing images in the CSS file and I have fixed that. (actually a CSS div background pointed to an image that didn't exist - but that was because I had moved the image to the foreground)

I haven't had much time to do any more diagnostics in the last day and a half - hopefully I can get back to it later this afternoon. I'll probably try and dump some key variables into the output stream and see if that helps me find out what is wrong.

[akc42]

I am beginning to wonder if it is related to queryless urls.

I have been adding some checking to Register.php to look at what is happening in the register case, and I am never getting beyond "Step 1".  It appears the post which should set the $_POST['accept_agreement'] variable is getting a 301 permenently moved failure and by the time it gets back to the Register.php function which checks it, it is no longer set.

I haven't yet figured out how queryless urls are supposed to work - I don't seem to have any .htaccess file but might be the whole problem - in that I deleted it when uploading the fresh software (rsync -a --delete) occurred.

I tried resetting the value in the database for queryless_urls to 0, but it didn't work - although I suspect its being cached, and being unable to log on, I don't know how to reset the cache.

[akc42]

It turns out to have been a bad setting in my Settings.php

$boardurl was set to http://hartley-consultants.com/forum rather than http://www.hartley-consultants.com/forum (ie missing the www)

In addition, apache was rewriting all urls that didn't conform to www.hartley-consultants.com to it - so the board url was incorrect, but was working in most cases as apache corrected it.  The POST case doesn't for some reason.

As soon as I fixed the Settings.php file all started working again.