Joomla admin login problem - authentication

Question

I've been having this problem on one of my Joomla sites for a while....when trying to login at the backend, the page just refreshes to the login form again. The same thing happens for the login at the frontend.
After some searching, I came across this link but I've tried all the suggestions there and none work for me. Plus my database tables are all OK. On my local setup, the site works just fine...I just imported the database to the hosting server. Then used SSH to restore the zip file from my computer.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

This time, for me to fix the issue, I had to change a line in the config.php file.
I changed
var $session_handler = 'database';
to
var $session_handler = 'none';
I'm not sure if it makes a difference to this particular task, but I also have a non-standard
var $lifetime = '60';
Thank you very much. Had a tough time before I found this solution, thank you.

Answer 2

We are a small uk Web Design agency, Joomla is our CMS of choice.
I/We've had this problem a few times. Actually, yes this problem does occur most noticably during server migrations.
This time, for me to fix the issue, I had to change a line in the config.php file.
I changed
var $session_handler = 'database';
to
var $session_handler = 'none';
Im not sure if it makes a difference to this particular task, but I also have a non-standard
var $lifetime = '60';
I can remember that last time, I had to empty the session table also (probably jos_session for you , unless you have picked a different prefix)
And this is how Jim fixed it for me, hope it works for you.

Answer 3

I had a problem very similar to this a while back. PHP wasn't able to write to it's session directory (or it didn't exist), so it just kept dropping sessions on login.
You can find this directory in the PHP.ini file. I think it's called session.save_path On Ubuntu it was in /var/lib/php5.

Answer 4

I too, have had this issue in Joomla 2.5 when using SSL. The admin panel will be working fine, and suddenly I could not login.
Turning off SSL (which is not an acceptable fix) worked, but I tried adding
public $cookie_domain = 'yourDomainHere.com';
in configuration.php and it seems to be working correctly for now.

Answer 5

I found this:
session.cookie_secure must be set to 0
add this to you server php.ini
session.cookie_secure = 0
or local php.ini
restart apache

Answer 6

f you are on Joomla 1.7 or 3.4 then here's my research and solution:
The admin doesn't works when you accidently disables the plugins related to user authentication or login.
Joomla 1.7 and 3.4 doesn't have jos_users table, and instead it stores all plugins in jos_extensions table for 1.7 and init_extensions for 3.4
Solution except if you are using a different prefix for your tables
Go to jos_extensions or init_extensions table and look for plugins like plg_authentication_joomla, plg_authentication_ldap, plg_user_joomla, com_login and com_users.
Once you find them then make sure they are enabled in jos_extensions or init_extensions table.
Update the enabled column from '0' to '1' for all above columns (plugins) in jos_extensions table, and make sure you hit the 'Go' button to save the updates to database.
Voila, and you are now back to the login admin form.
The post was helpful to me since it gave me enough pointers to find the exact root cause. However the original solution of this post was for Joomla 1.5 and 1.7 but I had to dig in for Jooma 3.4 and managed to fix my problem.
Thanks everyone for sharing and good luck!