Unable to log in after GoDaddy changed the site's IP

[AFC_North]

Hello again! My football website, http://www.afc-north.com, is hosted by GoDaddy, and I have installed Serendipity there to handle blog posts. I've had fun designing my own template for posts, limited only by my paltry knowledge of PHP and Smarty.

A few days ago, I received an e-mail from GoDaddy saying that my hosting account was being moved to a new server:

DNS NOTE: Your account has been assigned the new IP address ###.###.###.###. The A record of your primary hosted domain AFC-NORTH.COM has been updated. You must manually update the A record of any non-primary hosted domains not in your hosting shopper account to point to the new IP address.

If hosted subdomains have been set up through the Hosting Control Center, their A records have been updated. If hosted subdomains have been set up outside your hosting shopper account, you must manually update their A records to point to the new IP address.

If you need help modifying the A record of a particular domain, contact your domain registrar.

Sure enough, the site displays just fine, and I can access it with FTP, but I run into a problem when I try to log in to the Serendipity admin page. A bunch of PHP error messages are generated at the top of the screen:

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in...

I actually can log in with my username and password, and it displays the main menu, with twice as many PHP errors generated at the top of the screen.

But when I click on any of the options "New Post," "Manage Plugins," etc., I am returned to the login screen.

I am guessing that there is some setting I need to change to tell Serendipity where the new IP address is? Hopefully it is something simple and obvious, but I don't know where to look for it. I have downloaded and installed version 1.6.2, but it still isn't letting me log in.

Thanks for any help you can offer; if you need any more details, please just ask.

[Timbalu]

This DNS A record note should not harm serendipity, as long as they did not change path settings... or you are not using an IP adress as host name.
But obviously they changed the PHP version to a current one, which now, being to strict with old coding standards, sends these deprecation warnings.
You can turn them off by changing the error reporting variable in serendipity_config.inc.php like this

Code: Select all

    error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE ^ E_DEPRECATED);

~line 54.
If you still have login problems after this addition, look into the server logs, ask GoDaddy if that server change brought some differing path, or tell us which message arrives now.

[Mike_GoDaddy]

Timbalu is correct, Go Daddy recently removed support for PHP 4.x; accounts using PHP 4.x were moved to PHP 5.3. You can now only switch between PHP 5.2 and 5.3.

[AFC_North]

Okay; so far I've made the index page totally inaccessible.

The database is still intact, but I think I've messed up the upgrade of Serendipity and need to reinstall it.

To be sure I'm doing this right, I've got the unzipped "serendipity-1.6.2" folder, and inside that is a folder just called "serendipity."

Should I copy that folder as a whole to the home directory of my website, creating a "serendipity" directory there as well? Or do I need to just take the contents of that folder and put them in the home directory of the site?

[Timbalu]

Well, that depends where you had you previous installation installed...
You can have it in the root, as well as under serendipity or another name.
I would pronounce to put the content of serendipity right there, where you had the older one, to not mess up up with database saved path, if you still like to continue with the old settings.

[AFC_North]

Okay; I think I have made some progress, but I'm still locked out of the Serendipity administration page.

At GoDaddy, I was able to change the version of PHP running on my site from 4.x to 5.3. GoDaddy also offers Serendipity 1.6.2 as an application you can install, but it will not let me do that, because it says it needs PHP 5.1, not 5.3, and apparently I would need to switch to a different hosting plan to use 5.1.

I can install Serendipity 1.6.2 manually, though, and it gives me the login page, and now the PHP error messages are gone, but I cannot get it to accept my Serendipity username and password.

I have tried resetting the password using a bit of PHP code I found in these forums:

Code: Select all

<?php
$username = "thisismyusername";
$password = "thisismypassword";
include 'serendipity_config.inc.php';
echo serendipity_db_query("UPDATE {$serendipity['dbPrefix']}authors SET password = '" . serendipity_hash($password) . "', hashtype=1 WHERE username = '" . serendipity_db_escape_string($username) . "'");
echo "Password changed."; 

But the problem seems to be that the "authors" table in my database doesn't have a "hashtype" column to set to "1."

This indicates to me that there's a database update that needs to be run to reconfigure the database, but I'm not sure how to do that without being able to log in.

Do I need to go back and install an earlier version of Serendipity that will work with my present database, then log in and update the version?

Thanks again for your help.

[Timbalu]

If you remember the version of your old installation, change the serendipity version in serendipity_config_local.inc.php to this old version number. That should restart the upgrade process, which also fires database updates, if any.

[AFC_North]

Wow; that did it-- I have access again. Thank you!