QNAP NAS – Porting a Joomla Site

I am in the process of migrating my NAS content from a Synology RS-407 to the new QNAP TS-459U – very exciting. I will do performance comparisons soon, and the Synology device will end up on Ebay in a few weeks. For now I just want to report a small issue that cost me a little bit of sweat and an hour of my time (the latter is not so bad, given that I still have about 8 hours of copying data).

So I started by moving the Joomla files over into the /share/Web folder, then I installed phpMyAdmin (3.2.0.-Beta1), and imported a database dump from the old server. So far, so good. I created a new account, gave it access to the Joomla database, and updated the database credentials in Joomla’s configuration.php. The site was up and running, and it is blazing fast, compared to how anemic it responded on the RS407.

Then I thought I’d do something smart – change the default password for the root account in MySQL (QNAP ships it with a password configured). I made the change in phpMyAdmin – for all three instances (root@localhost, root@hostname, root@127.0.0.1). When I clicked on the Home link, I was redirected to the phpMyAdmin login page, and when it would not accept the new password, I was a little surprised. First I thought I must have mistyped the new password when I changed it, but I was able to log in to mySql with the new password from the command line just fine. So what was going on?

After some tinkering, I found this blog post with a hint. I updated the file config.inc.php, as described in the post, but still no luck. I tried variations of changes, and when I noticed that the user and password entries were actually commented out

   //$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = 'root';

I uncommented them. Still no luck. I uninstalled and reinstalled phpMyAdmin. No change.

Then I tried something different. I still had the URLs from making the earlier changes in my browser history. When I navigated back to the page server_privileges.php, I was able to get there – without being challenged. I was actually logged in, but something on the login page kept me from getting redirected to the home page. It would just refresh the login page, but not show an error message (when I tried the old password, I would get an error).

It dawned on me that this could be cookie-related. Once I clicked on the logout link,

I was able to log back in with the new password and was redirected to the main page. Phew.