Cannot view WP admin; Error: You do not have sufficient permissions…

Hi,

We’ve heard of a few other cases similar to this and are trying to narrow down the cause. It’s working on our own multisite test servers, so it may be a conflict with another plugin or a theme.

Can you tell me what plugins and themes are active on the site?

Also, if possible, can you disable other plugins and keep only the “twentyfifteen” theme active, and see if the same problem occurs when activating only Wordfence?

If you have any other customizations to the site in wp-config.php or use any special features provided by your host, let me know.

-Matt R

Hi,

let’s start with the simplest stuff, as I have more than 50 plugins (for testing purposes and some for the live page too).

You hinted at wp-config.php and other plugins. I use s2Member and s2Member Pro plugins, where I edited user levels in wp-config this way:
define(“MEMBERSHIP_LEVELS”, 5); // s2member Pro number of levels

Regarding themes I use OptimizePress 1, my own theme and again for testing maybe some other themes too.

I tried disabling all multisite plugins. The problem still occurs. Maybe I could try disabling all plugins on my main blog and see what happens?

Special features? I don’t think so… The only thing I know I use are some rewrites in htaccess to make sure people who write my web address with www or without it end up correctly.

I also have there 1 line of redirect code.

I wrote an email to Asa with some more details.

Best,

-Martin M

UPDATE: I can do everything on the page when I rename Wordfence folder.

So when I am finished with editing and everything, I just rename the folder back.

The page, where I just edited an article displays: You are temporarily locked out.

When I click the login link as logged in, I see the permissions error. (Error you do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.) However when I try to open the wp-login.php page, I see that I am locked out.

So where do I find a note about this in the database, so I could unlock myself. Or what to search? My IP? Some cookie content? Something else?

Thanks!
-Martin M

Hi Martin,

We have now identified a possible reason for the “You do not have sufficient permissions” error on multisite, which is scheduled to be fixed in the next release, but the lockout message in addition to that is unusual — I’m not sure if the reason you’re getting the permissions error is the same as the few others we’ve seen, because of this.

If you get locked out without any failed login attempts, your site might be using a “reverse proxy”, which prevents Wordfence from seeing see the IP addresses of individual visitors. You can check if this is the case and adjust Wordfence’s options to match your host by following the instructions on this page:
Reverse Proxy Troubleshooting

If IPs are appearing correctly, you could add your IP to the “Whitelisted IP addresses that bypass all rules” field on the options page, at least as a temporary fix for the lockout issue.

-Matt R

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the hope. ?? I will wait for the next release and keep you informed if it doesn’t help.

Btw, do you have a guide about how Wordfence writes data to database? Because when I start Wordfence, I get instantly locked out (with the “sufficient permissions” error). So I would need to whitelist myself via directly writing my IP in the database…

Thanks,
-Martin M

Hi Martin,

Version 6.1.8 was released yesterday, and includes a fix for the known case of “You do not have sufficient permissions” — can you try the latest version and see if you still have any issues? It’s possible there are other causes, but this is likely to fix the few cases we heard about.

We don’t have a guide to how to write specific options to the database manually, but we have a second plugin you can install, “Wordfence Assistant”, that you can use to turn off the blocking options in Wordfence before turning Wordfence itself back on. (The whitelist or this plugin would not help with the “sufficient permissions” problem though, because this was a bug affecting multisite installations only when another plugin/theme loads a WordPress core file too early.)

-Matt R

Hi Matt,

The update fixed the problem in my case.

Thank you!
-Martin M