XF 1.4 Cannot stay logged in to my site!

XBones

Member
I've been running XF for over two years and have always signed in, checked the "stay logged in box" and have never had any issues.

Two days ago I went to the site and I was logged out. So I logged back in. A while later when I went back, once again I was logged out.

This situation happened very abruptly. I had been on vacation and was browsing the site on my phone for days without an issue. Now on all my devices I am having the same problem. Desktop, laptop and iPhone all displaying the same behavior. Everything else works as it should on the site.

I have done all the usual stuff...cleared caches, cleared cookies, deleted website data and re-logged in etc. Nothing alleviates the issue. A few of my users have reported the problem too.

My site is a stock out-of-the-box XF install. No add ons, no script changes ... nothing (only changed the colors when I first installed a couple of years ago). It has been working flawlessly. I have made no changes other than several months ago upgraded to 1.4x. But that was months ago and nothing has been touched since. I am hosted with A Small Orange and they have been great up to this point.

I am trying to communicate with their technical support but it's a slow process and they, to this point, have not been helpful. I understand the first thing hosting companies do is point the finger at the user but unless the site was hacked it seems likely this is a server side issue. No?

Can anybody advise me any other steps to take to try and isolate the problem or maybe have advice as to what I might ask the hosting company to check? Something must have been changed somewhere and I'm know it wasn't on my end.

Thanks.
 
Sounds like you're visiting the site via www and non-www.

Ensure all traffic is redirected to either http or https.
 
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Sounds like you're visiting the site via http and https.

Ensure all traffic is redirected to either http or https.
@Amaury thanks for the reply.

OK, so where would I check to see where the traffic is being directed? And how do I change it?

Funny though however it is configured on my end it's the same as it's always been. Is this something the hosting would configure? And is it possible that they just changed that globally on Thursday when this started happening?
 
So what is recommended? If I type my site's name it defaults to www ... but on the other hand that is how it's always worked.

This is something the hosting company would change for me?

I still don't know why all of a sudden this issue appeared. However it's been working I have not changed anything.

So @Brogan you think that is the culprit too?
 
It's one possible reason so you need to rule that out.

You can confirm if it is the cause by checking the URL each time you are logged out.

If the problems suddenly started with no changes made by you then you may want to speak to your host to check whether they changed anything.
 
Www and non-www is a valid point, though I'm not sure if it is applying here.

If you're choosing to stay logged in but not staying logged in, that seems more likely to be a local client issue, though I don't know why it would suddenly change. It would probably only affect one device though.

This might lead to saying that the host isn't passing cookies through, though that's not trivial to verify, especially if it's sporadic. It's something that would probably be easier for us to test for. If you submit a ticket with FTP details and access details for an account we can test with (can be a new account), I'm happy to test that theory. I will need to be able to reproduce the issue though, so it may take a little while to confirm it.
 
On your site, I notice this HTTP Header:

Do you use varnish cache or something similar?
Does ASO implement it without your consent?
@RoldanLT Honestly I don't know. I am not a technical person and it's why my site is just bare bones. Nothing fancy. Just a hobby site.

So, I really don't know all the complicated nuances of what you're talking bout.

I am going to send the necessary information to @Mike as he suggested and see what the XF team thinks. The disturbing thing is that my site worked perfectly with zero changes made by me until last Thursday at around 4 PM PDT when I first noticed this issue. Very strange. This leads me to believe that the hosting company changed something. What I have no idea. A similar situation happened in June 2014 when the host made a changed something that caused problems. See https://xenforo.com/community/threads/cannot-log-into-admin.76212/#post-779819

This is why I suspect something changed on the server end.
 
On your site, I notice this HTTP Header:

Do you use varnish cache or something similar?
Does ASO implement it without your consent?
Varnish cache. That was/is the problem.

@Mike did some trouble shooting and confirmed that as the culprit. My hosting company just acquired another company that was using Varnish. How it got tangled up on the server I'm on is unclear.

Anyway, the hosting company has offered to move my site to another server that is not running Varnish which is what we're going to do.

Thanks again to @Mike and @Brogan for the help. Couldn't have figured this out without you guys!
 
Quick question.

So my hosting company is moving us to another server that does not use Varnish.

So my question is this: I want to close he board while the migration is taking place. However since the server is logging me to every 15 minutes, will I be able to access the site later to reopen the board? Don't want to get locked out!
 
You should be able to log in to the ACP directly and change the option.

However, assuming the problem isn't present on the new server, it shouldn't be an issue.
 
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