Support

 As soon as I password protect administrator, I'm locked out from administrator with a 404 error. renaming the .htaccess in the administrator folder allows access as expected.

Please advise.

-steel

The 404 error is probably a red herring. It is actually throwing a 500 error and trying to find a "pretty" error page. It can't find the error page and that second error throws the 404.

Not all servers support the password protect administrator feature. Your server appears to be one that does not support it.

Thanks for the prompt reply and I did read a similar explanation in another post but thought this might be different. I just installed the Purity III template and everything is still vanilla so I would have thought it would find their 404 page but I guess not. Is the 500 error a problem with the server supporting password of the administrator and is there a way to solve it? I am on a shared server at Hostgator so will understand if not.

Thanks again.

-steel

My shared server at Hostgator does support it. That would lead me to believe that yours should too. That's not necessarily true, but that's the way to bet.

Please make sure there is no .htaccess or .htpasswd file in the /administrator folder, NOT THE ROOT. Then set the password up again in Admin Tools. Please limit the password to 0-9, a-z and A-Z. Some versions of Apache don't like extended characters.

Thanks Dale. I had done that and just did it again. It occurs to me I did it wrong the first time in the sense that it has to be a registered user? So this most recent time I used my super admin info and still locked me out. I freely admit it might be a setting or something I just don't understand yet and appreciate the help. If you have anything else for me to try, I'll be glad to do it.

Thanks.

-steel

No, this is completely independent of the Joomla! users. This password works at the Apache web server level. PHP and Joomla! have not even been loaded yet and the Joomla! information is not available when it is triggered.

Ah! This is not something that I've had trouble with on Hostgator but we had nightmares with GoDaddy some time back. They cache the .htaccess files so it takes a while for changes to be reflected. Up to an hour on GoDaddy. That's a real long shot.

The password protect function is version sensitive, different versions of Apache need different command formats in the files. If your server is reporting the wrong Apache version to Admin Tools, that could mess us up too.

Check your host control panel at Hostgator, there should be an option to password protect a folder shown there. If you password protect the /administrator folder from there, you have done the same thing. The host panel will create the .htaccess and .htpasswd files just like Admin Tools does. That would at least tell us if it is supposed to work.

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