Limited access, no admin page

Hi @raymosely, this sounds like a tricky situation. Since you can ssh and have some Linux knowledge though it sounds like you’re in a great position to fix it!

Question, What do you see in the browser if you go the the site and try to see a /wp-login.php page. Any specific error message or page that gets redirected to? I’m wondering if WordPress core files were somehow deleted from the server.

It would be great if we could find the site on the server and see what files are there. I wonder if a command like find / -name wp-config.php could yield a result!

This page isn’t working
https://www.artisenergy.com is currently unable to handle this request.
HTTP ERROR 500

[aeiadmin@AEI-AZ-WORDPRESS artisenergy.com]$ ls
index.php wp-activate.php wp-config-sample.php wp-load.php wp-trackback.php
license.txt wp-admin wp-content wp-login.php xbkXxM6EtncfwRW3Ax5UkZXzCF9zGKXs.html
putoutput.txt wp-blog-header.php wp-cron.php wp-mail.php xmlrpc.php
readme.html wp-comments-post.php wp-includes wp-settings.php
searchoutput.txt wp-config.php wp-links-opml.php wp-signup.php
[aeiadmin@AEI-AZ-WORDPRESS artisenergy.com]$

[aeiadmin@AEI-AZ-WORDPRESS artisenergy.com]$ pwd
/var/www/html/artisenergy.com

[aeiadmin@AEI-AZ-WORDPRESS artisenergy.com]$ ls | grep ‘wp-config.php’
wp-config.php

/var/www/html/artisenergy.com

Great could you list out the contents of that directory with ls?

I’m curious if we’ll see an output like the following, which would be typical of a WordPress install:

index.php
license.txt
readme.html
wordpress.txt
wp-activate.php
wp-admin/
wp-blog-header.php
wp-comments-post.php
wp-config-sample.php
wp-config.php
wp-content/
wp-cron.php
wp-includes/
wp-links-opml.php
wp-load.php
wp-login.php
wp-mail.php
wp-settings.php
wp-signup.php
wp-trackback.php
xmlrpc.php
~

`

Another possibility for what’s happening here is some plugins that alter the default the login pages or even remove/alter access to wp-admin. If the structure of /var/www/html/artisenergy.com looks similar to the above, I’d be interested in seeing the contents of wp-content/plugins for security plugins or other common plugins that alter these things.

Finally, you could install the wp-cli tool on the server: https://wp-cli.org/ which could prove very helpful in checking for errors, installing additional plugins to help you, modifying user credentials to try to log in, etc.

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by Zack Krida. Reason: fix code block formatting

[aeiadmin@AEI-AZ-WORDPRESS artisenergy.com]$ ls -1
index.php
license.txt
putoutput.txt
readme.html
searchoutput.txt
wp-activate.php
wp-admin
wp-blog-header.php
wp-comments-post.php
wp-config.php
wp-config-sample.php
wp-content
wp-cron.php
wp-includes
wp-links-opml.php
wp-load.php
wp-login.php
wp-mail.php
wp-settings.php
wp-signup.php
wp-trackback.php
xbkXxM6EtncfwRW3Ax5UkZXzCF9zGKXs.html
xmlrpc.php

[aeiadmin@AEI-AZ-WORDPRESS plugins]$ ls -1
akismet
better-font-awesome
carousel-slider
contact-form-7
contact-form-7-honeypot
disable-comments
display-posts-shortcode
download-monitor
edit-author-slug
email-before-download
favicon-by-realfavicongenerator
forms-3rdparty-integration
google-analytics-for-wordpress
index.php
insert-headers-and-footers
list-categories
list-category-posts
pdf-embedder
per-page-add-to
popup-maker
safe-svg
scripts-n-styles
section-508
shortcode-in-menus
shortcode-widget
siteorigin-panels
so-css
so-widgets-bundle
tls-1-2-compatibility-test
updraftplus
user-role-editor
wordfence
wordpress-seo
wpcf7-redirect
wp-fastest-cache
wp-file-manager
wp-mail-smtp
wp-optimize
wp-seo-structured-data-schema
wp-smushit
youtube-embed-plus

Hi, Zack Krida, your replies are coming to me by email, but not showing in the forum.
I am installing cygwin so that I can run wp-cli.
Thanks,
Ray

Thanks for following-up Ray. Files look correct, I’m suspecting that wordfence (a security plugin) is blocking access to the admin area. You could try deactivating it with wp plugin deactivate wordfence and then trying to access wp-admin.php and wp-login.php. You can then also use the wp cli to list users, reset passwords, etc. to get access to the WordPress back-end.

I have wordfence deactivated, but still no luck with logging into admin

A section-508                     1.2.8
 UA akismet                         4.1.6
 UA better-font-awesome             1.7.1
 UA carousel-slider                 1.9.4
  A contact-form-7                  5.2
 UA disable-comments                1.10.3
  A display-posts-shortcode         3.0.2
 UA download-monitor                4.4.3
 UA edit-author-slug                1.7.0
 UI email-before-download           5.1.9
 UA youtube-embed-plus              13.4
 UA favicon-by-realfavicongenerator 1.3.18
  A forms-3rdparty-integration      1.8
 UA google-analytics-for-wordpress  7.11.0
 UA contact-form-7-honeypot         1.14.1
 UA insert-headers-and-footers      1.4.6
  A list-categories                 0.3
  A list-category-posts             0.83.1
 UA siteorigin-panels               2.11.1
 UA pdf-embedder                    4.6
  I per-page-add-to                 1.4.2
 UA popup-maker                     1.11.0
 UA wpcf7-redirect                  1.3.6
  A safe-svg                        1.9.9
  A scripts-n-styles                3.5.1
 UA shortcode-in-menus              3.5
 UA shortcode-widget                1.5.2
 UA so-css                          1.2.9
 UA so-widgets-bundle               1.17.3
 UA wp-smushit                      3.6.3
  A tls-1-2-compatibility-test      1.0.1
 UA updraftplus                     1.16.26
 UA user-role-editor                4.55.1
 UI wordfence                       7.4.9
 UA wp-optimize                     3.1.2
 UA wp-fastest-cache                0.9.0.9
 UA wp-file-manager                 6.5
 UA wp-mail-smtp                    2.2.1
 UA wp-seo-structured-data-schema   2.6.13
  A wordpress-seo                   14.6.1

Hi @raymosely so this could still mean a few possibilities:

1. WordPress core is damaged / missing files
2. There is other custom code / server configuration that blocks access to WordPress core

The second case is much harder to determine, and it’s likely I won’t be able to help you if that’s the case. We can however use the wp-cli tool to check for and fix the second case. Here’s some basic instructions. Please note that these commands would alter the WordPress files on your server, so there’s an element of risk in executing these, and you’d want to have some kind of backups or copy of the entire directory made before proceeding:

Inside /var/www/html/artisenergy.com:

– Check the current WordPress version with wp core version
– Then, reinstall the WordPress core files, preserving the site contents (and make sure to add the WordPress version from the above command into this script where noted: wp core download --skip-content --force --version="whatever-the-version-above-is"

This would reinstall all the core WordPress files, which may fix the issue. If this doesn’t work, I’m afraid I may have reached my limit with the help I can provide!

Thanks, I’ll try this. I tried wp core update earlier today, and got lots of permission errors.
I have been able to install ftp services and have ssh, ftp, and wp cli to work with.

Hi, Zack
It turned out that disabling the WordFence plug in was not enough. WordFence left a bunch of stuff in the .htaccess file. I took that out and wp-admin fired up and is working. I’ll patch up .htaccess tomorrow, probably by re-installing WordFence.
Thanks for you help. Between you, me, and one of my developers, we got it done.
Ray