[horde] "Login failed because your username or password was entered incorrectly."

[Robert P. J. Day]

Quoting "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at crashcourse.ca>:

>   i hope this is the right forum for this.  i just "dist-upgraded" a
> debian sarge (3.1) server to etch (4.0), and people who used to be able
> to use a horde client to connect to this system are suddenly getting
> the above diagnostic.
>
>   i'm googling on that error message to i've got a fair bit to read,
> but if anyone has any strokes of genius as to why that upgrade would
> cause that problem, i would be ever so grateful.

   after more testing, i have more information.  the system i'm  
working with is one i "inherited" on which to do the debian upgrade  
described above.  i was *told* that horde user authentication was  
being done simply against the linux system auth files (/etc/shadow),  
but i'm not convinced.  and i'm enough of a beginner at horde to not  
be able to verify that.

   /tmp/horde.log shows every attempt to log in with a combination of  
regular user account and password generates:

Aug 17 15:09:16 HORDE [error] [horde] FAILED LOGIN for rpjday  
[192.168.169.1] to Horde [on line 102 of  
"/var/www/<corpname>/horde/login.php"]

   that part of the login.php file is:

  if ($auth->authenticate(Util::getPost('horde_user'),
                             array('password' =>  
Util::getPost('horde_pass')))) {
         $entry = sprintf('Login success for %s [%s] to Horde',
                          Auth::getAuth(), $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);

... big snip ...
     } else {
         $entry = sprintf('FAILED LOGIN for %s [%s] to Horde',
                          Util::getFormData('horde_user'),  
$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
         Horde::logMessage($entry, __FILE__, __LINE__, PEAR_LOG_ERR);

and that last line is line 102, so it's clear that authentication is failing.

   also, i browsed to the horde/test.php page, and got a bunch of:

Notice: Undefined index: fileroot in  
/var/www/<corpname>/horde/lib/Test.php on line 583

that doesn't look good but, again, i'm not sure what to make of it or  
how to fix it.  horde was working fine until the sarge -> etch  
upgrade.  with what little i know, i have to guess that horde is *not*  
authenticating against the system password file, otherwise it would  
just work.

   thoughts?

rday