3.9 to 4.1 upgrade locked me out of admin

  • Hi all,

    I upgraded from 3.9 to 4.1 tonight, and while I’ve done the upgrades since early 2013 without issue, this time was different. I suspect because I did skip 1 major release, I must have missed something important because I am now locked out of my admin.

    I first tried to login again and it wouldn’t take the password. So I thought I would reset my password. When I got the password reset email and clicked the link, I was told that my key was invalid. That happened 3 times, so I decided to just delete the password from the database in mysql command line and login with no password (I had the admin locked down to only my IP address by the apache config as I run wordpress on a cloud server where I have full root, and I’m a linux system admin by trade). That failed because the login page won’t take a blank password.

    So I started looking at the other ways to reset the admin password on the codex. I followed all of them, but none worked. I also tried the emergency.php script and one that was hosted on a 3rd party site but linked to from the codex. None of these made ANY changes to the password, and I checked the code as best I could — none appeared to be syntactically incorrect, however I am admittedly not a developer.

    The only thing I could do was the mysql command line method where you update the password field using mysql’s built in MD5 functions. Unfortunately, while that did set the password field to an MD5 checksum, I am still unable to login.

    I’ve also made a backup of my document root after the upgrade and reinstalled wordpress from scratch (copied my wp-config.php to the new directory) and also manually disabled plugins within the database), with the only effect of all of that being that my site now displays a blank page (wp-admin still shows the login page though).

    Any assistance that anyone can provide will be greatly appreciated, as I am at a loss.

    This site is a personal blog site that I don’t mind being down for now, but I don’t want to lose it’s contents, and ultimately do want to get back online.

    Also one final note… I was stupid and didn’t make a database backup, so a restore to the old version is not possible.

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  • Thread Starter Speeddymon

    (@speeddymon)

    [redacted]

    Thread Starter Speeddymon

    (@speeddymon)

    Well, I enabled logging of my php errors and was able to determine that the activation key wasn’t working for password reset because I had only GRANTed SELECT to my wordpress database user for the wordpress users and usermeta tables. So I changed that to all privileges, and was able to reset my password and get in. Now that I’m in, I’ll go back and re-enable plugins and make other changes necessary to get the site back online.

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