Hi – I’m trying to help my Mom resolve a problem on the EGroupware that her office staff uses. I’m hoping that posting the details here will result in some help.
Version they are using: 1.2.105
Summary of problem: Administrative rights have disappeared from all accounts, including the “admin” account that they never touched. (There were two other user accounts in the system that had admin rights.)
Problem they have: The “admin” icon/button has vanished from every single user on the system, including the two regular admin users, and the “admin” login to the system. From doing some searching in various places, I see that this is a problem that is mentioned not too infrequently,
and it looked like it would be pretty easy to fix. All I have to do, is to create a new account that has administrative rights, so then I can go in and fix the other accounts that should have it. I seem to be having trouble finishing this process, however. Below are several details.
Part of the problem I have: Their original egroupware setup was done by my brother, who died about three years ago. Therefore, I am doing most of this stuff without having much clue on the original setup and if it was customized at all. I am working off the few notes that were left, and the user manual, and the posts on the forums (some of which have already been quite helpful).
It seems extremely likely to me that this problem was created by one of the two regular users who had admin rights on their system, before. That has to be it, right? No one can tell me how it happened, but I’d be surprised if it was anything but one of them accidentally removing all Admin rights from every single account, probably while they were in there adding the last new user. Now they’d like to add two new users to their calendar, and of course no one can. I logged in with the username “admin”, and as mentioned it was also missing the Admin icon/button at the top.
I see, in the user manual for this exact version, that you should be able to fix losing all admin rights for every account, by simply going to the egroupware/setup and getting to where you can do a “Create admin account” step.
I did this, creating a new account, and was able to log in as that account immediately afterward, but that account, too, did not have an “admin” button/icon at the top. (I did not tell it, when creating this new test account, that it should also create demo accounts. Demo accounts shouldn’t matter one way or the other, though, right?)
The thing I thought was possibly odd was that there was no other choice there to tell it to give admin rights to all apps. (I thought I’d seen this in someone’s description of the fix, or perhaps a screenshot of it that I found online somewhere, in my many searches on this. Basically, a checkbox that looked like it should maybe be there, but wasn’t. Or maybe that is a version thing?)
There was also a box that I did not check, because I wasn’t sure how destructive it might be, but it was the box that said to “delete all existing SQL accounts, groups, ACLs and preferences (normally not necessary)”. Perhaps I should have checked that box and then it would have worked? I suspected it wasn’t related but am not certain. Argh.
(Then I looked in the manual, where it specifically mentions that if you accidentally remove admin rights, this is the place to fix your problem. I think I might have cursed once or twice at this point.)
One other thing I did was to run the test on the installation (“Check installation”) and it showed all green checks except for one red X that was regarding the header.inc.php file (saying that it was world readable and that was a possible problem). There were also a few yellows in there but not sure if that was even significant (or if the red X was) to my issue.
I took several screen shots of things while I was there, so I could puzzle over this some more. I can post or provide these if they’d help.
Some sort of disconnect is still in the mix here; I feel like I must be missing something simple, and am thisclose to pounding my head on an actual desk.
(They are not averse to moving to the latest version, if that would help, but the one they are on has been fine up until this admin-rights-missing-entirely thing happened. Also, if they had to move to a new version, does it save the already-existing users, calendar, address book, etc? And, of course, if nothing else, they are willing to simply move to a new version even if they have to re-enter a bunch of data, but are hoping to not have to do that.)
I still can’t help but think that there must be something quite obvious that I am just overlooking.
Thanks!
—Beth
