Question

Sorry for this newbie question but I can't figure out how to log-out. TWiki thinks that I'm logged in as TWikiGuest and, even tho I think I have .htaccess, .htpasswd, TWikiRegistrationPub, etc. working, it won't ask me for a new user name. What am I doing wrong?

ChristopherBladon - christopher@bladonPLEASENOSPAM.com

• TWiki version: dec 2000
• Web server: apache 1.3
• Server OS: linux 2.2.19

-- TWikiGuest - 07 May 2001

Answer

I'm pretty much a newbie at this, but I'll try to help. Anyone else can feel free to chip in.

I'm a little uncertain about what your problem is -- I think I see three possibilities:

1. When do you notice that you are TWikiGuest? Have you tried editing? TWiki (in the configuration I use) normally allows you to view pages without logging in, and considers you to be TWikiGuest at that time.

If you've never tried editing then you've probably never logged in.

2.If you've tried editing, and it has been successful, you've logged in and hopefully you were recognized while you were editing, previewing, and saving. However, after you save an edit, you go back to a "view" which is not "authenticated", TWiki no longer cares who you are, and your name will show again as TWikiGuest (unless you've set a special option to remember who you are based on your IP address).

3. Finally, if you have registered and have logged in once in a browser session, most modern browsers seem to be able to remember who you are and don't require another log in unless you shut down the browser and restart. (I think it may save your user ID and password in a "session cookie" (a cookie which is not saved on disk) or has some other mechanism to remember that you are logged in.) So, if that's the problem you are having, shut down your browser and restart it. (In IE5, which I usually use on Windows, if I've opened multiple windows, I have to shut down all of them to get IE to forget that I already am logged in.) (Some of this is just a long way of saying that, AFAIK, there is no explicit way to log out of TWiki -- you just need to sort of "go away" and then TWiki forgets you were logged in, unless you set a special option somewhere that tries to remember who you are based on the IP that you are using. If that is set, I suppose you'd have to change your IP address to log out.)

I hope this helps, but I wrote this rather quickly, so it's probably somewhat confusing. If you can be more specific about your problem or you have additional questions, please add them and maybe we can get a more specific and clear answer.

-- RandyKramer - 08 May 2001

So, you did what was labelled "Optional: If you are on a non authenticated server (i.e. not using SSL) and you would like to authenticate users" in TWikiInstallationGuide?

-- MichaelFinney - 10 May 2001 - 19:51

Regarding point 3 Randy is talking about: TWiki uses basic authentication; cookies are never used. This is what happens in the background with basic authentication:

• The server requests username and password for each protected page.
• Most browser ask for username and password just once and remember it.
• The next time a authenticated request comes from the same server, the browser will send the username/password pair (in plain text) to the server without prompting the user. This is done for user convenience.

There is no way to log out of basic authentication, you need to restart the browser as Randy stated.

-- PeterThoeny - 10 May 2001

I had the same problem described above. The cause was that in the httpd.conf file (in my case, on Mac OS X), it says

# First, we configure the "default" to be a very restrictive set of
# permissions.
#
<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None        <-- Note this line
</Directory>

The AllowOverride None directive was effectively disabling the entire .htaccess file.

The solution was to add AllowOverride All to the TWiki section of httpd.conf as follows:

<Directory "/Library/WebServer/TWiki/bin">
    Options +ExecCGI
    SetHandler cgi-script
    AllowOverride All
    Allow from all
</Directory>

-- JonReid - 22 Jun 2001