Support

I am unable to access the back-end administration of my website.
I have tried all of the rescue methods I found on you website with no success.

The website is still visible at https://onlineinspectorcertifications.com (front-end login is username: guest and password: view)

I have saved quite a few .jpa backups on the Amazons S3 Cloud that I can download, but I'm hoping it will not be necessary.

Are there any additional things I can do?

What happens when you try to access the back end of your site? What do you see?

All I get is a blank screen, but no error message.

OK, so it isn't giving us a lot to go on. Let's disable some stuff and see if we can beat it into submission.

1. Rename the .htaccess file in the /administrator folder. This is a hidden file so your FTP client or file manager needs to be set to be able to see it. If there was a problem with the administrator folder password protection and the 401 error was hidden, it would fit the facts.
2. Disable Admin Tools with the instructions here: https://www.akeebabackup.com/documentation/troubleshooter/atwafissues.html
   . Look under the blue tips box for the section "Using FTP to regain access to your site's administrator". That will completely disable Admin Tools.

If either of those steps works, it gives us a clue about what is going wrong. If not, then we have to do some "white screen" diagnostics to see if we can get it to give us an error message.

1. I just tried turning on the php error detection using the MultiPHP INI Editor in cPanel.

2. I then tried to logging int the back-end administrator and received a white screen again and an Akeeba tools related error.

3 Next I tried setting the PHP to 7.0 and still had problems.

4. Then I renamed the .htaccessfile in the /administrator folder, and was able to log into the administrator. I then noticed noticed a recommendation to use PHP 7.1 or better, so I upgraded to it.

Everything seems to be working now, but I'm now going to re-enable Akeeba tools, but am concerned about setting it up correctly and what to do about the renamed .htaccess files. Is the a way to reset Akeeba tools to default values?

I will keep this ticket open for a while in case I run into more problems, but will close it when I'm convinced that I am out of trouble.

You need to be careful with the First Run Wizard. There are two places that it can lock you out of the back end of your site. The .htaccess and .htpasswd files in the /administrator folder are the first way. The user ID and password that you were prompted for were set up during the wizard, they are not your Joomla! user ID and password. You can delete those two files. If you want to set it up again, use the Password Protect Administrator option in Admin Tools.

The second way it can lock you out is the Secret URL Parameter, on the first tab of Configure WAF. If there is a value in the Secret Parameter field, you must call the back end login with the URL:

www.mysite.com/administrator?SECRET

Where SECRET is the value in the field. If the bad guys can't find the login page, they can't try to log in.

I thought I had final found out how to successfully adjust the settings for AKeeba Tools but I now find I have to rename /plugins/system/admintools/main.php to delete-main.php periodically.

Would it be best to unistall akeeba tools and reinstall it to correct whatever settings I am missing?

Uninstalling and reinstalling will start over with no settings at all. The First Run Wizard will want to run again. Just be careful of what you are telling it to do, there are some gotchas in there.