In a subdomain of my site I have an installation of MediaWiki, and until now it's been working fine. But today I've been having trouble with it. Previously, whenever I logged into MediaWiki it worked first time and I would stay logged in for about an hour, even without the "Remember Me" option checked. But I tried logging in now, and after logging me in, the next page I went to showed me as "not logged in". I cleared the cache as I know this has been a problem before, and then tried logging in again, but it still said I was not logged in! So I tried one more time, this time clicking the "Remember me" option. This time I stayed logged in.

All's fine, right? Nope! I try to edit a page I've been working on in MediaWiki, and it complains that it can't save "due to a loss in session data". This happens no matter how many times I click "Save". So I try logging out and back in and then try editing the page again. The same thing happens again.

By now I'm getting pretty annoyed, so I decided not to work on that anymore and instead go to another part of my site - a Joomla installation in my main directory that forms the basis of most of my site's content. All's working fine there, but then I realised that I need to sort out some news articles on the site. So I try logging in to my Joomla Admin Panel to sort that out. It doesn't let me in! I check my username and password carefully and then try again. It says I'm being logged in, but then takes me back to the login form, nothing has happened, and there is no error messages or anything!

So both Joomla and MediaWiki aren't logging me in properly. I decided to check if there was any damage in my database tables, since both softwares use MySQL tables to handle session data. I have two databases to keep the individual software's data seperate, so I went into CPanel and ran a check on both. But CPanel reports no problems with either Database. Just in case, I ran a repair on the databases anyway, but it had no effect.

I am really stuck to find a reason why both of these softwares have suddenly stopped working properly, when they worked perfectly only yesterday and I can't find any trouble with the Databases. Can anyone tell me what is wrong and/or suggest a fix? I would be highly grateful for any advice.

Have you submitted a request for assistance at http://xistosupport.com?

If the script uses PHP's session_start() function, that may be the source of your problem (i would assume so since you mention "session data"). I wouldn't say it has anything to do with the database. The issue may deal with permissons on where the sessions are being created. If you try again later, you may be able to log back in, as this has been occuring randomly.

It appears that would be the case, as trying it today the scripts work correctly once again. So this has been happening to other people at random intervals? Seems weird to me, but at least I can continue working on my site. I just hope this doesn't happen again anytime soon.

Anyway, topic resolved. Thanks for the help.