Support

>  In J3 I could rename a file and fix this.

You can still do that as I have personally documented in https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/admin-tools-joomla/atwafissues.html 

The link to this documentation page:

• was presented to you in the Quick Setup Wizard page (as a shortened link) with the note to please print that out that page and reference it if you get locked out of your site.
• was emailed to you by your site when you submitted the information in the Quick Setup Wizard because we know that people will outright ignore our instructions to print out a list of a small handful of short links which will help them not get stuck.
• was emailed to you by your site every time you changed anything in the Web Application Firewall (Configure WAF) and server configuration makers (.htaccess Maker, NginX Conf maker, Web.config Maker).

So what is exactly the point you are making here? That you ignored the documentation repeatedly and made an arbitrary and wrong assumption leading to your desolation and heading you towards a bad and irrational decision? Yes, I can see that. I will try to address that if you are really interested in solving your issue.

> I am only super user and tried all your helps. they do not help.

Sorry, but this is not the case — and I really hate having to prove a client wrong just because it's a public ticket and I don't want other people reading it getting the wrong impression about our software, our documentation and our support.

You have not asked for our help and you did not read our troubleshooting documentation. The first is obvious, the latter requires some explanation.

You came here unaware that you can, in fact, rename a single file to disable Admin Tools. This means that you have not followed any of our troubleshooting instructions for Admin Tools for Joomla 4. It's possible that you tried to follow the instructions for Joomla 3 even though our documentation is clearly title “X for Joomla 3” and ”X for Joomla 4” where X is the name of the software. There are different documentation pages for Admin Tools for Joomla 3 and Admin Tools for Joomla 4. And yes they are different because the Joomla 4 versions are complete rewrites since Joomla 4 is a massive upgrade to Joomla itself, far bigger than Joomla 2.5 to 3.0 was ten years ago.

Had you followed the instructions on our troubleshooting page there's no way you'd have been unable to gain access to your site if your only issue is an IP address change as you claim. That page asks you to rename the provider.php file. Renaming the provider.php file makes Joomla unable to load the plugin at all. This file is the Joomla 4 equivalent of main.php in Joomla 3.

If you still cannot gain access to your site it might be either the main .htaccess file or the .htaccess and .htpasswd files from the Administrator Password Protection feature. Again, the troubleshooting instructions are documented in https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/admin-tools-joomla/athtaccess500.html and https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/admin-tools-joomla/atadminpw.html

That said, your problem is very simple and most likely a matter of following the instructions in the first link I gave you, including the instructions under “Administrator IP Exclusive Allow List”. I am saying this because you stated that your problems only started when your IP changed.

> I will have to reconstruct 4 web sites.

If your car doesn't start do you tow it to the junk yard and buy a new one? Of course not! Why do that with your site, then?! Let's use some common sense here.

If you are blocked out of your site because of an extension you can, at the very least, rename the folder of the extension. Extensions are in very predictable places in Joomla, following a predictable naming pattern. The location and naming patterns have not changed since Joomla 1.5 which was released in 2007 — 15 years ago.

Even if you forget your password you can easily fix it since you have full access to your database and that's the hardest recovery operation you have to do in Joomla!.

You only start a site from scratch when you are using a large number of obsolete extensions no longer maintained or supported making a migration impractical OR if you have messed with core Joomla files so much as to have no idea how to recover the site to the nominal Joomla state. You do not have this kind of use case, making starting from scratch a completely pointless and irrational decision.

> Will forego akeeba for now.

You seem to have written this while being stressed, tired, frustrated or generally having a bad day. It's OK, we are all entitled to a bad day and I am willing to ignore that comment.

Please do follow the troubleshooting instructions I linked you to. If you need further help let me know what is the problem you're trying to solve and I'll help you. Do keep in mind that we always help our users. All you have to do is ask, preferably nicely so it's less frustrating for both parties.