User Passwords

[m1byo]

Hello,

Every now and again, when certain users are trying to logon to the system they are getting the passwords denied as incorrect. this happens on both webmail and Outlook (using IMAP)

After investigation including, resetting the password in outlook, resetting the user password using the web-admin interface, and trying on webmail, all leading to the same unsucessful results, I then restarted the AMS service and hey-presto everything started working again.

This does not occur for all users, in particular, it has happened to one user 2 or 3 times now.

Do you have any idea what would be causing this and what can be done to prevent it?, I am using the odbc accounts system at the moment.

Thanks

Ian

[Code Crafters]

There could possibly be a bug with password encoding of certain characters if you are using password encoding in the General settings. Check what the user's password is to see if this could be the problem. We have had no other reports of this problem so far. You may also find it more appropriate to divulge passwords and other information to us for investigation by email to info@code-crafters.com.

[Code Crafters]

The password you sent me by email definitely isn't the problem as its only alphanumeric. It's possible that somehow the users.ini file or ODBC database containing the password cannot be opened when the account is accessed causing the login to fail. Also, try disabling encrypted passwords to see if that makes any difference.

[m1byo]

Hello Chris

Thanks very much for your quick reply, I will disable encrypted passwords and let you know if it happens again.

Thanks again

Ian

[m1byo]

Hello Chris,

This issue has occured again, and it is only on the same one account, other accounts can log in without any issues.

The uptime of AMS is just less than 36 Hours this time.

This is with password encryption still disabled.

Thanks

Ian

[Code Crafters]

For this to happen on just one account, it is highly unlikely that the database access is the problem. Its possible that someone knows the password and is changing it to gain access althogh if rebooting the software fixes it that this probably isn't the problem either. If you are running Windows Vista be aware that different settings are used depending on if you run the application as administrator or not. Other than these things its hard to speculate what else could be the problem. Check the user account logs to see if any password changing is occuring.

[m1byo]

Looking at the account log, there is all of the IMAP activity which was happening as the issue occured, and then there is a 10 minuite break until I restarted the AMS service, then everything continued.

There are no password changes occuring on the password log so there doesnt seem to be anyone resetting the password. Also, when this issue first occured I went through the process of resetting the user password to fix the problem, however this did not solve the problem.

Thanks very much

Ian

[Code Crafters]

Could you please zip up your "C:\Program Files\Code-Crafters\Ability Mail Server 2\config" folder and send it to chris@code-crafters.com for me to analyse. You may need to export all your settings (tools page) minus the account mail data if the folder is too large. I will look into the problem to see if I can replicate the scenario and hopefully fix the problem.

[Pugglewuggle]

Hi Chris,

I've had this happen in the past multiple times with multiple users over the span of about a year and a half. The only way to get around this is to either switch modes (app, svc) or restart the server machine.

VERY ANNOYING. Support calls for stuff like this take too long and the ENTIRE SERVER has to go down just to fix 1 user's problem. I think this definitely needs to be addressed as well. I haven't had this happed since I got the new server, but it happed weekly or more often before that. I even emailed Rob about this and asked him a few questions. I don't recall his response, but I don't think it ever solved the problem.

Keep it coming though! AMS is great!

[Code Crafters]

It's still very strange that this only affects one user. Access to ODBC or the INI file system for user passwords would cause all to fail if the file or database couldn't be opened. Try deleting and re-adding the user to the system. All files will remain if you don't select to delete additional files. This is a very hard to trace problem. Hopefully, version 3 will solve this with its new real separate service and dialog interface structure.

[Pugglewuggle]

Glad to hear your seperating that! It'll make AMS much more stable (it's already AMAZINGLY stable - it's only crashed once in almost 2 years. This was due to me opening the admin dialog -- I never figured out what happened).

There had been no access-restrictions on the INI files. I remember checking the NTFS permissions. Even after we switched to ODBC (running MS SQL Server 2005) we still had this issue every once in a while. I remember that restarting the server would usually solve the problem, but that still should never be necessary.

Because of experiencing this issue with both FS and ODBC modes of access, I have to assume this has something to do with AMS' code. Please again note that I haven't experienced this since upgrading to a new server recently, which could loan blame on the hardware's throughput capacity (considering the * huge * amount of processing / IOPs that are required to authenticate a username/password). Lol, just kidding.

Also, please note that this would happed to different users at random, although not very often, including myself, once. Not just 1 user.

[Code Crafters]

It's very possible that you can't log in because of security measures like anti-hammering or IP restrictions. Please check the logs (POP3, IMAP4, WebMail or SMTP) when this happens and send me the actual error given when login fails so I can more accurately see what the problem might be.

[m1byo]

When I have experienced this problem, I get "Incorrect login details." on webmail and the Username and Password box on Outlook.

It makes no difference how many times the Username or Password or Both is re-entered, it will not go past this point.

I havent experienced this problem for a while, when I experience it again, I will send you all of the logs.

Ian

[Code Crafters]

I need to be able to replicate the problem to solve it so at the moment it's hard to investigate this. If you find any information that can help trigger it reliably please let me know.