Turnkey Phpnuke install completes but I cannot login to the admin console.

I have just spent a bit of time mucking around with phpNuke and I can't get it to work either... :(

Here is some other stuff I tried:

• rerunning the TKL initscripts (using a very simple password and again with a much more complex password - double checking that i entered and used the correct password; testing for password complexity requirements).
• editing/resetting the admin user password (MySQL - in the 'nuke_authors' table)
• manually adding the admin user to MySQL 'nuke_users' table (should work without it, but thought it worth a shot)
• deleting the existing admin user altogether (the 'nuke_authors' table, which should make phpNuke itself ask for new admin user credentials)

And none of these steps work... :(

Now that I have deleted the admin user I am stuck in the same loop except trying to add an admin user...

Further troubleshooting steps I've tried:

• changing the phpNuke DB user password (to double check that it is not a DB connection issue - it's not!)
• granting ownership of the whole /var/www file & directory tree to www-data (to check that it isn't a file/directory permissions issue - it's not!)

So I've run out of ideas... The only thing that I can think of is that there is actually something broken in the version of phpNuke that TurnKey Linux has installed...

FWIW I have lodged a bug on the issue tracker.

This is a VM on VMware

Is this a VM (under VirtualBox/VMware or similar) or some other platform (OVZ/LXC/etc) or on bare metal?

I will test an OVZ instance on my Proxmox host to see if I can recreate the issue.

I will test this out ASAP and see if it is the solution to the TurnKey image's issues.

Regardless, major kudos for trying to help out! People like yourself help make the internet a great place! :)

Thanks anyway for sharing.

I think what we need to do is to pull this appliance from the TurnKey library for now... It appears broken and IMO it's better to not have a specific appliance (phpNuke in this instance) than have a broken one...

And despite my best efforts I came up (pretty much) blank... :(

As I posted on the issue (on GitHub):

Further research suggests that this is a common phpNuke issue, with numerous causes (and thus numerous solutions - depending on the specific cause...). After spending some time on it I am no closer to discovering the issue... I'm not sure where to go with this next...

I found 50 something threads that relate to this login loop issue and none of the things I tried (such as adjusting the server time, deleting the existing admin user from the DB, adjusting PHP error reporting level and so on...) resolved it.

Unfortunately I can't justify spending any more time on it ATM. I think that the next step would probably be for me to just look at the TKLDev source and update it to the latest version of phpNuke and again...

FWIW perhaps it is worth you considering one of the alternatives in the meantime (even if just for evaluation)? TurnKey Linux also has XOOPS (which from my reading forked from phpNuke many years ago). There are also many other CMS available - some obviously more relevant than others depending on your usage requirements.

Hopefully there will be a fix.  TurnKey is exactly what I am looking for.