noob question: "You need to enter a password for the system admin account!"

Just got modx downloaded and now starting to install it on my test server running Ubuntu. I got through the database connection stuff OK, but when I click the "next" button I get the message: "The page at http://192.168.1.21 says: You need to enter a password for the system admin account!".

I’m guessing that this might be because Ubuntu (for security reasons) requires all commands that can change anything to be entered via "sudo command..." and then the user password given, but I’m not certain if this is actually the problem or not. And, more to the point, I’m not certain what to do about it.

Any suggestions?

Many thanks,

- Dave

There’s a quirk in the installer for 1.0.0 when you do not create your database ahead of time: you need to click on the "Create or test selection of your database" link a second time after it creates the database to expose the additional form fields, including the password for the system admin account.

Wow! I’m impressed!

Your reply was almost instantaneous and was exactly what I needed.

Many thanks for your help!

- Dave

Well, hopefully this will be the final followup question....

Now that I’ve got it installed I find that I can’t log in to modx. I get to the login screen and give it what I believe was the user name and password I entered during the installation but it says they are invalid. Between setting up mysql, forum account and the actual modx installation I guess I entered a lot of name/password combinations, but I’m pretty sure I recall the ones I entered for the modx setup. However, just to be sure, I also tried my email address, "root" and "admin". It didn’t like any of these.

I also tried the "forgot password" option to email me my password, but I don’t have Ubuntu set up with an SMTP connection (and not sure how to do that) so the email never actually gets sent.

If anyone has any suggestions to get me past this step I’m hopeful that I can actually get started learning modx.

Thanks,

- Dave

http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,275.0.html

Thanks for that link... LOTS of good information there. I’ll try to assimilate all of it (or as much as possible, anyway) tonight and see if that gets me going.

I’ve done database programming for decades but only started getting into mysql last year. Just when I was starting to be able to find my way around in it I got pulled from that project onto other stuff and haven’t had a chance to look at it since then, so I’ve now forgotten most of what I’d learned. Hopefully this will get me back into again.

Thanks again for the help. There appears to be a great user community associated with modx.

- Dave

OK, I finally got in and am able to start working with modx, though not exactly in any of the ways described in the link above. I’ll give a brief explanation of what I encountered and what I ended up doing in the hopes that:

• It’ll help someone else who encounters the same things I did
• Someone can explain why I encountered this problem
• Someone might suggest a better way for me to handle it than what I did

As per the tutorial linked to above, I connected to the database with phpMyAdmin and checked the modx_user_attributes table. As expected there was only one record - for the admin account. The "blockeduntil" field was already set to zero, so this didn’t appear to be the problem (which I would have suspected anyway, since the error message I received was that the user name/password was invalid, not that it was blocked).

Seeing that this table didn’t actually define user accounts, I then started searching for what did. I next checked the modx_manager_users table and found (I thought) what I was looking for. There was only one account set up: "admin" and there was its encrypted password, which (obviously) I couldn’t determine the unencrypted value for. Though I was fairly sure I knew what password I had given during setup. Once again I went back to the login screen and tried logging in with "admin" / "[password]" only to be told, again, that these were invalid. Back in phpMyAdmin once more I tried to edit (and encrypt) the admin password as per one of the instructions in the tutorial, but couldn’t figure out how to persuade phpMyAdmin to allow me to do this (sorry - I’m really not overly proficient yet in phpMyAdmin).

So now I tried a different approach... I created a new modx_manager_users entry to make a secondary account. I gave it the password I believed I had originally supplied for the "admin" account and encrypted it via MD5. Now, when I looked at the entries in this table, I could see both accounts and could verify that, indeed, the encrypted values of the two passwords were identical, so clearly I had been using the right password all along. But still it wouldn’t allow me to log in. And, of course, I tried logging in with the new user account I had just created, but got the same result. Just to make sure I’d dotted every "i" and crossed every "t", I created a new row for the secondary account in the modx_user_attributes table also and set everything to match the admin values. Still no luck.

Finally, I started casting about for anything else that could affect my ability to log in to modx. Seeing a modx_web_users table I investigated that and - bingo - there was the "admin" account defined again, this time with an obviously different password. Once again I added my secondary account to this table and gave it the same password I’d been using all along. That was the step that finally worked! I could now log in to modx through a web browser using this secondary account.

So the remaining questions I have are:

(1) why are two separate tables required to define users/managers of the system?
(2) why did modx give a different password to the web_users "admin" account than to the manager_users "admin" account?
(3) what password did it actually assign to the web_users "admin" account?
(4) how do I edit rows in phpMyAdmin (OK, I guess I can look this one up elsewhere!)

Thanks again to all who helped with this. If anyone has any ideas about these last few questions I’d be very interested in any explanations. Otherwise, hopefully this will be of some assistance to other noobs just getting started.

Best regards to all,

- Dave

web_users has nothing to do with logging into the manager account. I’m perplexed as to how this could have anything to do with your problem. If anyone has any ideas what happened to ebenezerhouse here, I’d certainly love to hear the theory. As is, nothing in what you described makes sense. The default admin account created at the beginning should have worked if it works now, unless something else changed amongst the rest of what you described.

I tried to be as thorough and deliberate as possible with each step that I tried, so while I may well have misunderstood some aspect of what I was trying, I think the sequence of events is pretty well as I described.

The admin account still does not work, even though I confirmed that it is, indeed, the user name assigned at installation time and that the password (in the modx_manager_users table) is what I believed it to be (confirmed by adding the 2nd account with the same password and comparing the MD5 encrypted password values in the database).

The second account also would not let me log in (again via browser from my client computer) when I first created it in the modx_manager_users table, but did allow me to log in immediately after I added it to the modx_web_users table. Go figure! Needless to say, this doesn’t prove a cause and effect relationship - something else could have happened in the midst of all this but I did not intentionally perform any other steps, nor am I aware of any that could have been done inadvertently.

So, as I said before, I’m open to any and all theories as to what has happened. I very much appreciate the help and discussion here. Even if I’m still a bit baffled I feel like I’m learning a great deal more about modx through this discussion. Hopefully it will be of benefit to others as well.

- Dave

For future reference, there’s a description of how to get into the MODx manager after being blocked or forgetting your password here:

http://bobsguides.com/modx-newbie-faq.html

(near the bottom).

As for the OP’s problem, I’m wondering if he was trying to log into the front end (with WebLogin or WebLoginPE) rather than the Manager. The fact that there were web users suggests that there’s a front-end log in as well.

The only other thing I can think of is that there was a directory access password set in .htaccess and the OP used the same username and pwd there as the one for the web user or manager (though the solution described shouldn’t have fixed that).

Is it possible that the first solution (editing the manager_users table) worked but not until the login page or browser cache was refreshed?