Site Switch

Posted: Wed Nov 30, 2005 4:21 pm

I have Nuke 7.4 with 3.1 patches and Sentinel 2.4.1 running on a shared host. I'm preparing to upgrade to 7.6 (have that all running on localhost). So I was testing the site switch feature of Sentinel. I had two tabs of Firefox running, in one I was logged in as admin in the other I logged out and sat there as anonymous. I also had two more tabs running: one in PHYmyadmin and the other in my host manager so I could edit the htaccess file if I got myself banned.

I was able to to set the site switch on to disable the site. Fine. I looked at it in the anonymous tab and I got the admin_site_reason.tpl file showing as things should be. Good. But I believe that when the user tries to access the file a second time he/she gets banned. So now my IP was banned. I went into the nsnst_blocked_ip table and deleted the banned record and also into htaccess and delete the deny from statement for my IP. Okay, now I can get back in as either admin or anonymous. I also went into the nsnst_config table and changed the site_switch field (oh I mean column) to 0 from 1. So anyone can get back into the site.

However after doing this, anytime I try to go back into sentinel admin and set the site_switch field to disabled (which I believe corresponds to a value of 1) I get banned. Yeah, I could exclude my IP range from being banned but then I wouldn't be able to test what happens to an anonymous user.

So my questions: is a non-admin user supposed to get banned on the second try at access? Looking at the code it appears that the admin user can always get in regardless of the setting of site switch. Right? And does anyone have an idea why I would be getting banned when trying to turn the site switch back on after the sequence of events outlined above.

If someone has a test system they can try this on and let me know if it works there I would appreciate it.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Aug 27, 2002 Posts: 17088

Please update to v2.4.2 and see if you still have the problem.

Posted: Wed Nov 30, 2005 6:49 pm

Actually the upgrade to 2.4.2 is part of the overall upgrade I am doing. Running it separately is just an extra step that I can't justify at this point and I know that means I (and my users) will just have to live with the "problem" if it crops up. I believe however that the problem may be an artifact of having two Firefox "tabs" open, one where I am connected to the site as anonymous and the other where I am logged in with my admin ID. I say that because the blocked abuse message that I get says in part:

"Date & Time: 2005-11-30 13:27:57 PST GMT -0800 Blocked IP: 72.226.59.71 User ID: Anonymous (1)
Reason: Abuse-Admin"

In that session I am actually logged in with an admin id but I'd guess that Sentinel may just be getting the first id associated with the IP address (there would be two in the sessions table) and then getting very upset when that doesn't turn out to be an admin id. I will look at the code when I get a chance but I'd bet that's what's happening.

Posted: Wed Nov 30, 2005 9:50 pm

Sounds very likely Wink