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Admin Tools

#32778 password protect administrator keeps popping up

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
This is a public ticket

Everybody will be able to see its contents. Do not include usernames, passwords or any other sensitive information.

Environment Information

Joomla! version
n/a
PHP version
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Admin Tools version
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Latest post by on Saturday, 02 May 2020 17:17 CDT

nguidry
i've password protected the administrator and even though i save the login in my keychain it keeps popping up. Not only does it popup when i first login, sometimes it pops up when just working in joomla. I may go between working on an article page and then switching to a module and it may popup each time. Sometimes i get popups 5-10 times while working in joomla for only a few minutes. It's doing the same with other joomla sites and i'm not sure what's causing this. I using Admin Tools on all my sites and this recently started happening. It also happens on different computers so it's unrelated to the computer. I use Macs and using Safari and High Sierra as the OS. Any ideas?

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
This issue is unrelated to Admin Tools. In fact, this issue is not really implemented in Admin Tools itself but your web server and your browser. All Admin Tools does is create two files, a .htaccess and a .htpasswd, in your site's administrator directory. The former tells the web server "this directory is password protected". The latter says "these are the usernames and passwords allowed to access this directory".

It is up to the web server and the web browser to implement the password protection. It typically goes like this.

The browser tries to access a protected resource without sending a Basic Authentication HTTP header.

The server sees that and replies with HTTP 401 Unauthorized.

The browser sees that HTTP error and displays a popup to you, the user, to enter a username and password. Then it retries the request but this time it includes a Basic Authentication header with the username and password. If you choose to save these credentials with the browser any subsequent request to a protected resource will be sent with the Basic Authentication HTTP header.

So, either your server doesn't recognize the username / password combination your browser sends (unlikely, since entering the same thing works immediately after) OR your browser "forgets" your credentials. I would first try to check if browser settings synchronization is causing the credentials to be wiped out. That would explain why it happens periodically, predictably and for all sites. It would also address the sudden occurrence; either these sync setting changed recently, or there's a bug in their implementation after a browser update or a third party browser extension is screwing up big time.

FWIW I am of course using this feature on all of my sites, live and local. I am using pretty much every major browser out there on all major Operating Systems. I have not seen that issue. But I do understand that bad sync settings would most definitely cause it. That's why my educated guess is to start looking for a sync issue; that's what I'd do if I had the same problem.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

System Task
system
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