I've already solved this problem, but when I was searching around for it I couldn't find anybody who had my specific error, so I'll post my resolution here.
Original Problem:
A user calls to say he can't log into the system. I try it myself and find that it does log in...sort of. The "Welcome [user]" success message would display, but then when the default page was displayed, none of the user options came up (create albums, etc).
I was confused. I logged in to the admin panel and noticed that I couldn't even see the user in the list. Wierd, the logon is processed so it must be "there" it's just not in this list. I Googled around and didn't find anything for myself.
Wing and a Prayer
Hoping it was something that had been fixed in an upgrade, I upgraded my coppermine install to the most recent version (from 1.4.4 to 1.4.10). No effect, the user still cannot log in. Oh well, at least I'm up to date.
Discovery
I logged in to phpMyAdmin and looked at the cmine_users table. There was the user. Everything looked normal to me, but this doesn't mean much since I don't really know anything about the database. I started to try other accounts through Coppermine's login page and found a couple more that didn't work, as well as most of the other ones which did.
The common thread between the accounts that didn't work was that they were all user_group 5. A look into the usergroups table revealed that there is no usergroup 5...at least not anymore. After an "update cmine_users set user_group=2 where user_group=5;" the account can log in now.
The Real Question
How did this happen? Was there a bug in old code that allowed a group to be deleted but didn't reset user's groups? Looking at the interface now I don't see an option to delete a group. I'm not that familiar with it though, I haven't had to do anything with users (until now) in a long time, so maybe the delete group functionality is hidden somewhere else. I dunno.
Why aren't releationships defined in the database to prevent this from ever happening? Should there be and I'm missing mine?
Was there a security vulnerability (that allowed someone to delete a row from the usergroup table) that maybe I was exposed to by running 1.4.4, and that has now been fixed?
Anyway, I hope this helps someone if they have this same problem, I'm sure it must be something very unique to my install because it seems to be only me that's ever encountered it, lol.
-FD
Author
Topic: Some Users Can't Log In (Read 3647 times)