WP-Admin “not available” even after plugin removed

Hi, your issue is not really related to this plugin. Your issue is more related to setting up WordPress in it’s own folder. Please read the following documentation.

Thank you

Thanks for responding, but I’m not setting up WordPress in its own folder, so it would be difficult for this to be the issue. (Although down the road, was planning to.)

I have two separate instances of WordPress running, one for the live site & one for the dev site.

Upon further research, I agree — this is not related to the plugin. There does seem to be an issue related more to domain-level redirection which is unrelated. If I find a good answer to this, I’ll post it here in case someone else has a similar problem. So not marking resolved yet..

Hi, no problem. It would be nice for you to share your solution for others.

Thank you

Finally resolved this.

Difficult to say how the plugin was interacting with other factors, but it definitely was making things tricky, and moving it via FTP did not provide a quick fix. Thought Chrome’s aggressive caching might be part of the problem, but I saw it in other browsers, too.

That said, this seemed to be primarily an issue of file permissions and ownership. I was seeing other issues while setting up the dev site, such as missing a minified CSS file. I’d moved many files to a new location using the root user, and my plugins, themes, and uploads were all owned by root. I had to update that:

chown username:username -R plugins

(Okay, actually had to use sudo to do it, and I did this for the other folders, too. Could’ve run it on wp-content folder.)

This cleared up many problems. In fact most of them, and I think this was the main factor which was affecting All In One WP Security & Firewall’s odd behavior.

So, lesson for the day: pay attention not only to file permissions, but also to ownership.

The dev site still doesn’t have a proper SSL certificate, but I got everything working anyway, so I don’t think that was a factor.

Phew.

Hi, well done and thank you for sharing.

File permission and ownership is very important for WordPress and this security plugin which unfortunately you found out the hard way. But to me it is a learning curve and if you did not run into this issue you would not have found out the importance of file permission and file ownership.

Enjoy the plugin.

Kind regards

Greetings everyone!
Hello @jcdesign, after using the All In One Security plugin I’m getting the same problem that you faced. Could you explain step by step how to solve it? I’m a beginner and this is my first project.

Hi @dilneinovaes, (1) the key word in my answer above is “think” — I thought this is what fixed it, but I was not absolutely sure. Your mileage may vary.

There’s not really a step-by-step answer I can give you beyond what I wrote above, although I can explain it a little better. If you have shell access to your server (or, if it’s local, whatever command line app you use), you’ll want to check the permissions and ownership of the wp-content folder.

Navigate to that folder in the command line and use this command to list files and directories with the verbose setting:

ls -al

You’re looking to see if the user and group look right. This is something you can safely do without making changes. Warning: the next step is not reversible. Be sure you have a compressed backup of your files before proceeding.

Run this command for each directory:

sudo chown username:username -R plugins

… where username is the one you want to own the content, and plugins is the directory. the -R flag means “do this recursively”, i.e. to all files and directories within.

Good luck,
Jeremy