After nearly a year of not upgrading the MediaWiki software for my
Disinfopedia (
www.disinfopedia.org), I finally got around to it
today. I got everything working at a temporary URL except that
passwords aren't validating properly. When I try to log in, I get a
message that says:
Login error:
The password you entered is incorrect. Please try again.
If I create a new user account, the password works properly, but
existing user accounts all seem to give me the error message.
Fortunately, for the time being everything is still working properly
at my usual URL, but can someone help me figure out how to fix this?
I searched the Wikitech archives and came across the following
message from March 2003, which may have some bearing on my problem:
Message: 7
From: "Tim Starling" <ts4294967296(a)hotmail.com>
To: wikitech-l(a)wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] What, no salt?
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 09:24:03 +1000
Reply-To: wikitech-l(a)wikipedia.org
Obviously we'd have to add a note explaining
that everyone has to reset
their password. Not everyone has an e-mail address attached to their
account, so we'd need to add a web form for doing this. That obviously
would require first validating the person with their current password
with the current hashing code; so we'd probably need a marker to
indicate that each users' password field is upgraded.
No-one will have to reset their password. I'll just use md5(md5(password) +
salt) for the new hash. The only thing users will notice is that their
stored cookies will stop working and they'll have to log in again.
-- Tim Starling.
Apparently the password validation scheme was modified around that
time to add "salt" to the password hash. Is it possible that this is
the cause of my problem?
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (
www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
| Weapons of Mass Deception
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