Login fails for local copy of DNN site

Question

I've been tasked with maintaining a DNN site that has been running for a while, so I copied it to my local development environment to get up to speed on the setup. I have the site up and running locally, and I can browse all (I think) of the pages. It seems to display correctly and yesterday, the DNN login worked correctly. However, today, when I try to login to manage changes, I enter my username and password on the login page, but it does not actually log in. On screen, all that seems to happen is that the password field clears. No error message displays. In my Firebug console, the only error message that appears is "Password fields present in a form with an insecure (http://) form action. This is a security risk that allows user login credentials to be stolen." Again, yesterday, I was able to log in and get to all of the DNN management features -- I changed skins, modified CSS, changed code, etc. I've tried multiple logins (host, superuser, and regular user) -- all have the same result.

I don't see anything in the database EventLog, except for a startup record.

I saw a couple of other SO posts tangentially related to failed DNN logins on development environment, and checked that Form Authentication is Enabled in IIS and the security for the site folders are set correctly and the folder is not read-only.

I generally use Firefox for development, but I also tried IE. I'm certain I'm missing sometime obvious, but it has me stumped. Ideas? I'm new to DNN, so I'm not up to speed yet on the best practices for debugging. Any other suggestions would be welcome.

Some details: Live site is SQL Server 2008; Dev is SQL Server 2012. Both sites use IIS 7. Dev is DNN 7.2.2. Locally, I'm using VS 2010 for development.

Answer 1

Couple of things to check.

1) Check to make sure your database connection strings (2 of them) in the web.config are both pointing to your local database.

2) Check to make sure the MachineKey values in the web.config still match the values in the production web.config

3) You might turn off SSL on the site, though you'll have to do that in the database as you can't get logged in. I believe you can likely just set Secure to 0 on all of the Tabs table records, but you might need to track down a HOST setting as well to make this work (hostsettings table)

Answer 2

An update. I was able to get this to work by using a different user account. I'm still not sure what the root of the problem was, but I believe it was related to specific settings on my particular user account. I used a generic 'admin' account, and was able to make it work.