Support » Plugin: Wordfence Security - Firewall, Malware Scan, and Login Security » Better error message if this is from Wordfence …

  • Resolved chuckingit

    (@chuckingit)


    Hi – i experienced some strangeness that i think might be attributable to Wordfence thus share as fyi in case it is …

    while developing on a recent site i noticed that two of my client machines on my internatl network were blocked from my WP Multisite development server … no matter what user i tried to log in with from those two machines, WordPress login message would fire generic message about needing to turn on cookies … yet on the primary client machine, i could log in no problem with any user name …

    fast forward and solution = turns out that after i emptied the Wordfence tables, i was able to log in thus the problem cleared …

    inbetween figuring out what was going on, i had un-activated all plugins, tried different themes, removed mu plugins, enabled debug mode, etc but to no avail … i then re-optimized WordPress tables, restarted server just incase there was a leech process being triggered at lower level but i digress …

    once the Wordfence tables (meta values and not the config options), everything came back to life … hence this forum post …

    my sense is that my ip got flagged for some reason and maybe then matched to my machine address which might explain why one machine was fine but the other two could not log in* … i’m running a firewall going out through cable provider so even my 3rd machine that was on wireless network all three showed same cable provider ip address …

    if i’m correct in that there is some kind of throttle going on, then perhaps a better error message would be in order -e.g., instead of saying “get your cookies” (which is not the problem thus misleading) to something like -> “hey – log ins from this ip are flagged – please call tech support yada yada” …

    the other thing i thought strange was even with Wordfence turned off (deactivated) the failed logins from other machines were present … which further suggests something got stuck into a WP table somewhere that really locked that throttle ..??…

    Kudos to a really cool plugin as Wordfence is awesome … best of ongoing success … cordially, chuck scott

    *technically limiting logins to one machine per session = BRILLIANT and i was testing WP-Bouncer plugin last week that does similar – only allows one log in from one device at a time … so my reason for posting this is not so much about the way Wordfence works, as much as it is about the error message that was not helpful …

    http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordfence/

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  • Thread Starter chuckingit

    (@chuckingit)

    Update = Disregard my previous post as i believe my problem had too do with my ISP’s or router cache* and not WP, Wordfence, or other plugin, code, conflicts, etc …

    note in total today i got locked out several times and it was after the initial time i got back in when i posted thread above thinking it had to do with Wordfence or WP but not so given the subsequent experiences …

    as fyi … after i got locked out and unlocked back in, i then repeated the process of re-installing Wordfence, one by one with other steps and still locked out but this time my unlock steps of cleaning tables did not work …

    it was only after i asked another person in other office in other state to try with same login credentials that were failing on two of my three client machines, and when that person could log in i realized it was a network thing most likely on my end …

    so i uninstalled everything once again, rebuilt, repeated, rinsed, yada yada and then tried to login but still had issues on two of the three machines no matter what i did …

    luck would have it that the wife brought her laptop home tonight so after dinner i asked her to fire up her laptop, hop on our wireless network, and OMG – she had no problem logging in with the very same user credentials that were blocked on two of my internal machines …

    so once she got on, i then tried to re-log in on one of my erroneous machines and voila – now it could log in …

    which leads me to conclude that the router cache (even though i reset it and did hard reboot after power down) or ISP* was doing something …

    all of which kind of makes sense looking back as the WP login message was complaining about cookies not enabled which made no sense to me at the time …

    but if the ISP* or router cache was serving something sans cookies, well then okay, i now get why that message … and i suspect that the wife’s machine hopping on my network forced the ISP/router cache to adjust (to the new gal) hence now all my machines can log on …

    yeesh … what a day … cheers – chuck scott

    *Maybe it was all an NSA thing that failed to clean up after its cache self in one of those nifty chip hacks they installed in Big Name High Speed Internet Provider Company modems and routers available at all the Electronic Big Box Stores Near everybody :>0

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