login problems on my vBulletin site

[mattswanson]

At some point in the recent past few hours, the login functions on our site seem to have failed.

Now, all login attempts fail and go directly to the message that indicates you have exceeded the login attempts quota (currently set to 5) even if it is just the first failure.

None of the logins are working, including into the admincp.

The last change I made to the site was the installation of the recent patch 3.6.8 patch 2. But I have been able to log on since the installation of that patch.

Any ideas on what is going on?

[snakes1100]

Upload tools.php to the admincp folder and reset your info & delete it after your done.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

To troubleshoot this, please remove any hacks and disable your plugins, then see if you still have this problem.
Note: To temporarily disable the plugin system, edit config.php and add this line right under <?php

define('DISABLE_HOOKS', true);

If so, reupload all the original vB non-image files (except install.php). Make sure you upload these in ASCII format and overwrite the ones on the server.

If your problem still exists, please create a new Style with no Parent set. Now browse the forum using this new style, do you still have the same problems? If you are troubleshooting login or guest issues, you will need to set this style as board default in the vBulletin Options.

[mattswanson]

Thanks for the input. I figured out the problem. I'm surprised we have gone this long without running into this before...

While the site is a community site (we are a newspaper group) many of our staff participate on the site in various ways. All of the internet connections for our 4 offices come through our central office so we appear as a single IP to the site. One subforum in the site is set up as an internal, company only, forum where we post company information. Yesterday, the HR person put a new form there and sent e-mails out to every body in the company including login information for people who had never logged on before. Apparantly we had a string of failed loggins. Since they all came from the same IP, evey user within our company was blocked.

My only complaint is that it also blocked access to the admin system.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

I don't know how this proxy server is setup in your office, but setting it to use the client's IP for the connection (instead of giving everyone the IP of your proxy) should solve that issue.