v3.8.11 on Debian9 with mariadb 10.1 cannot login?
 

Hello,

I am trying to do some research for a friend to upgrade their forum instance. They are currently running a fully patched debian 8 system with vB 3.8.11 and everything works properly.

In order to try to help them with the upgrade process I have made a VM clone of that system. If I uninstall php 5.6 from debian 8 and install php 7.0 there are no issues and their forum works properly inside the virtual machine.

However, if I do a full apt-get upgrade; apt-get dist-upgrade to debian 9 then when I try to access the forum index page I get the message

'You have been banned for the following reason: No reason was specified. Date the ban will be lifted: Never'

If I try to access the admin page after I enter the login credentials it simply loops back to the login page.

My suspicion is that something in MariaDB 10.1 for Debian 9 has changed, maybe some system setting, and it is causing some query to behave badly.

I have tried removing ever plugin that was installed to vB and also ensured all of the php files are untouched.

I have turned on vB debug information but I don't see anything obvious.

I can tell that on debian8 with php 5.6 or php 7.0 when it works more queries are being executed when hitting the login page.

Has anyone else seen a similar issue or have any suggestions on what I could try to track down the source of the problem?

Thanks in advance for reading and any suggestions.

You have a problem with the encoding in the database.

Thanks for the suggestion. I manged to get the forum displaying properly by adding the following into the config.php file

$config['Mysqli']['charset'] = 'latin1';

What confuses me though is if I check the character_set in mariadb with the query: SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'char%';

I can see the character set is not latin1 but utf8.

However, if I go into the admin panel for vB and check the diagnostics for MySQL variables I see character_set_results, character_set_connection and character_set_client reporting latin1

I'm not sure if this is due to the config.php value or if something else has a misconfigured value.

When doing the apt-get upgrade, is apache being updated?

If so, depending on apache 2.2 or 2.4 verify apache has mod_rpaf or remoteip module installed.