Admin account on IPFire Box not reachable

1

Hi There,
Since a reboot I am unable to reach the IPFire box using 192.168.1.1:444, and thus seem to have locked myself out of the administration account. The firewall, router and OVPN functions seem to work.

The changes made by me that required a reboot were to transfer the logs to an external drive (USB) following the wiki made for this (wiki.ipfire.org - Transfer the logs to an external drive). Not sure why this would/could influence IPFire to refuse to connect to a web-browser.

Input appreciated

IPFire version 2.27 update 159 -
When logging on to the system using a web-browser - I get the following error message (Firefox):

Unable to connect

Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at 192.168.1.1:444.

The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network connection.
If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

Using Chrome it looks like:

This> site can’t be reached

192.168.1.1 refused to connect.

Try:

ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED

Reload

Hide details

Check your Internet connection

Check any cables and reboot any routers, modems, or other network devices you may be using.

Allow Chromium to access the network in your firewall or antivirus settings.

If it is already listed as a program allowed to access the network, try removing it from the list and adding it again.

If you use a proxy server…

Check your proxy settings or contact your network administrator to make sure the proxy server is working. If you don’t believe you should be using a proxy server: Go to the Chromium menu > Settings > Show advanced settings… > Change proxy settings… and make sure your configuration is set to “no proxy” or “direct.”

2

Can you reach IPFire by SSH or, much better, on the console ( monitor/keyboard or serial, depending on your HW ) ?
If yes, just try

tail -f /var/log/messages

This should show the actual errors and warnings.
For errors of the webserver ( which realises the webGUI ) type

/var/log/httpd/error_log

You can combine this

tail -f /var/log/messages /var/log/httpd/error_log
2 Likes
3

Thanks for the input Bernhard -

I did manage to get a serial connection going - but after that did not manage to resolve anything. I suspect something went badly wrong while attempting to follow the wiki page on moving the logs to the extra hard-disk - followed by more wrong doing when trying to resolve (both cases likely due to me being a novice).

As update 160 came out, I prepared a new disk with this update, reinstalled ipfire and then restored the available backups to the virgin system.

Now all is running fine again.

I will not pursue the log file disk transfer.

Thanks for your swift reply to begin with.
Greetings,
Bernard

4

I can understand. But to find an issue in the transfer description, it would be good to have a more detailed report.

1 Like
5

Hi Bernhard,
I worked on it some more:

  1. The logs are lost. I looked back at a copy of the disk, and there is no /var/log folder. This is not too surprising, as the wiki requests to delete this folder on the sda3 disk.
  2. The main problem of not getting into the admin account may not be related to the change I attempted to effect. What I noticed is that the system becomes unstable/unresponsive a while after a fresh restage of IPFire. (after several days or a week or so)
  3. I noticed that a fresh install leaves a lot of unused disk-space on my 16 GB mSATA disk, with sda3 occupying some 1.7 GB, leaving approx 14 GB unused.
  4. After resizing sda3 to make use of the free space on disk, the issue has not emerged since. The resize is performed right after copying the flash image onto the disk and before placing the disk into the machine to run the installation procedure of ipfire.
    Still no conclusive proof, but wanted to provide an update nonetheless.
    Greetings,
    Bernard
1 Like