I have had the system running with ubuntu and webmin and about 11 wordpress sites and everything has been running flawlessly for well over a year. Last time I logged into virtual min using my username and password was last week. Today using the same credentials it does not allow me to log in and locks me out and I have to restart the webmin service to try and get back in. I am able to access usermin on port 20000 using the same credentials and it allows me to log in. I am also able to log into all my websites. How Do I log back into webmin? I do have direct access to my server so that is not an issue.
Webmin seems to ban you. Try with a different browser coming from a different IP and make sure that the webmin port is open. If the server is in a DMZ of your LAN come in from the internet to avoid problems of the many firewalls. Try to use the server IP instead of the url.
Webmin has brute force protection, yes. If you mistype the password a few times, it’ll block you with authentication failed for a few minutes. It does not tell you that you’ve been blocked via this mechanism.
Fail2ban can also do this for just about any service, and it does it via firewall rules, which you can tell has happened (because you won’t even get a connection to the service)
I don’t know that OP is running into brute force protection. It sounds like they’re confident of their password being right.
Did you change your password for the user in Webmin Users and Groups or via the changepass.pl command at any point? That would divorce your user from the system password for that user (and I don’t recommend folks do that, since it leads to a situation like this, where the password for Webmin is different from every other service, and if you forget you did that, you can no longer log in).
Using the passwd command or changing the password via the Change Password feature in Usermin or changing the password in Virtualmin avoids this problem. Webmin has its own user database, with its own passwords, if you want it to. But, you almost certainly shouldn’t want it to.
Thnaks for the reply. I have tried that and still no go. The server is on a DMZ. Tried the external ip address to access but still running into the same issue
Thanks for the reply. If I did change the password it would have been thru webmin users and groups however I dont recollect doing so are I must be really loosing my mind. I am able to log into usermin and If I try and update a new pasword there I get an error msg saying ailed to change password : /usr/share/webmin/virtual-server/change-password.pl (username) failed :
I am at an impass at this point and any suggestions are welcome
I think the terminal is your friend. When I understand you right you have physical access to the server. If not I hope you have SSH open. Login in with the webmin administrator. If that doesn’t work you might have still user ‘root’ active. Then you have won the game. My suggestion of using another browser was, because then you are forced to type username / password and the right url.