Support

On one of the sites I manage I upgraded Gantry from 4.1.36 to 4.1.37 but after that the from of my site turned to a million numbers and characters. So I decided to run am Akeeba Restore. When I did a warning popped up that said,
""WARNING !!!
Your database password contains special characters. Many web servers reject or modify these passwords, causing the database restoration to fail with a database connection error.
We VERY STRONGLY recommend that you change your database password to a long (32 characters or longer) random string consisting of ONLY uppercase letters A-Z, lowercase letters a-z and numbers 0-9.
Do you want to ignore the warning and proceed with the database restoration at your own risk?"

So I changed the password in our HostGator account to one without special characters. Then when I went back to login to our site I could not because the URL refused to work because I had changed the password for the database. So I put the old password back in and now I was able to login to our admin area again at least.

I ran the Restore process anyhow but all I get is "This page isn’t working p2personaltraining.com is currently unable to handle this request.
HTTP ERROR 500"

I am stuck between a rock and a hard place it seems. What can I do now to restore my sisters site for her? Can I do it the old fashioned way using FileZilla after I change the database password to include no characters?

The database password and the login password are two completely different things. The database password is set from cPanel when you create the database user. This is the password that you got the warning on. You would enter this password on the database settings page during the restore.

The login password is set in the Users section within Joomla!. You can change the administrator password during the restore process. Usually the administrator user is "admin" but it doesn't have to be.

I'm pretty sure the 500 error means that the restore failed. If you deleted your /installation folder (you were supposed to) then you need to use Kickstart to extract the archive again and start over. If you just renamed your /installation folder, you can rename it back and just visit your site, p2personaltraining.com, and you'll be redirected to the restore process.

Thank you. The site front end is working again but I did not misunderstand the passwords Dale. I changed the password on the database side, within the cpanel, because Akkeba warned of the following. """WARNING !!!
Your database password contains special characters. Many web servers reject or modify these passwords, causing the database restoration to fail with a database connection error."

BUT once I had changed the database password I could no longer access the Joomla admin page of our website at all. So I still need to know the process so I can change the database password withing our host cpanel, and still be able to access our Joomla admin area so that I never have to trigger that Akeeba Restore warning again.

If it works at all, you're fine. Some hosts don't properly handle the password string and only part of it gets sent to MySQL. That would cause a fatal error. It wouldn't work at all.

Think of a CSV file. If you have a field delimiter within a text field, you need the text field enclosed by double quotes. Then the field delimiter is properly considered part of the field. Without the double quotes, the delimiter breaks the field into two and screws up the file.

The same thing happens to the password string if it isn't handled properly. HostGator is handling it properly, so there's no problem. Next time you create a database password, consider using only a-z, A-Z and 0-9.

To change the password at this point, you would need to change the password in cPanel, then edit configuration.php and search for the old database password. It would be eye readable in that file. Replace it with the new password and you're all set. You can also change the password during the restore process. If you have the wrong database connection settings, the restore will fail. It wouldn't let you get to the point of login. My best guess is that you typoed the password when you tried to log in. That guess is based on the fact that all my fingers turn into thumbs when I try to type a password.

ok awesome. Thank you Dale

You're welcome!

This ticket has been automatically closed. All tickets which have been inactive for a long time are automatically closed. If you believe that this ticket was closed in error, please contact us.