Magento admin login process problem at first time after installing it.

Question

I am facing weird problem with magento admin login process. After installing fresh magento on live server, whenever I login at admin side first time, it will not login though the username and password are correct. Just after few seconds I will login with same username and password it will login successfully. I have searched a lot on net regarding the same. But I couldn’t get rid of this. Any help from you guys will appreciate.

Answer 1

Are the url's you use for log in the same? I mean maybe one is www.mysite.com/admin and the other is mysite.com/admin (without www)

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_{Initial this was a comment, but I add it as an answer as @Tim suggested}

Answer 2

Been on this tonight myself, I empathise. Basically there are a few things to check. As it's a live server I imagine you do not have the classic gotcha of the localhost problem, and the domain is a proper domain.

First of all, here is a good StackOverflow Q&A with advice from Alan Storm about your server config, timezones, ini settings, PHP write permissions. It could be that,

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9075539/cant-login-to-magento-admin

Ashley Schroeder ended up building a wiki on it here;

http://www.aschroder.com/2009/05/fixing-magento-login-problem-after-a-fresh-installation/

And there is some more good stuff from gabrielk in this thread;

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/33778/

None of this worked for me, and I had a client who couldn't access his orders (mine isn't a new site, it's been up for about 6 months!) so I had to sort it fast. To my irritation I have had to resort to the 'fix' (read nasty core hack) of modifying Varien.php by copying this file to local;

app\code\core\Mage\Core\Model\Session\Abstract\Varien.php

And commenting out the following (it's lines 85 to 102);

    // session cookie params
    $cookieParams = array(
        'lifetime' => $cookie->getLifetime(),
        'path'     => $cookie->getPath()//,
        //'domain'   => $cookie->getConfigDomain(),
        //'secure'   => $cookie->isSecure(),
        //'httponly' => $cookie->getHttponly()
    );

    //if (!$cookieParams['httponly']) {
    //    unset($cookieParams['httponly']);
    //    if (!$cookieParams['secure']) {
    //        unset($cookieParams['secure']);
    //        if (!$cookieParams['domain']) {
    //            unset($cookieParams['domain']);
    //        }
    //    }
    //}

I do not want to leave it this way obviously, so if you find a fix which isn't mentioned above, post it here. Incidentally mine is on a AWS server with a bitnami image which I am convinced has been misconfigured somewhere.