[Mediawiki-l] Password authentication

[Rob Church]

On 16/09/2007, Matt Weaver <Matt.Weaver at westlakelibrary.org> wrote:
>
> Hi, I just installed MediaWiki 1.9, but it will not allow me to log in using the info I gave when I set it up. It rejects my password. In my "localsettings.php" file, it gives the proper password: just to be sure, I even copied the password from localsettings.php and pasted it into the login window.

The installer tends to accept two sets of user credentials (it will
accept up to three, but it's often the case that the third doesn't
need to be provided) - a username and password for the database
connection, for everyday use, and a username and password for the
sysop account.

These are *two separate sets of credentials* which are stored in
completely different locations. When you log into MediaWiki, you need
to use the sysop credentials. [Apparently, people keep forgetting to
read the box that these are entered into, or get confused, so we could
potentially make this clearer.] By default, the sysop username is
"WikiSysop", but if this isn't the case, then a quick glance at the
"Special:Listusers" page ought to reveal a user with sysop and
bureaucrat permissions; this is the account you want.

Of course, this isn't a hell of a lot of use if you don't know the
password for said account, so the likelihood is that, once you've got
it, you'll need to use maintenance/changePassword.php, or manually
update the database (Google "MediaWiki password hash" for dozens of
pointers) to reset the password. You can then use the RenameUser
extension to rename the account, if you'd like.


Rob Church