Alfresco loses 'admin' username and password

[rajakari]

Hi,

first a little introduction…

We are extending our Web Framework (for financial institutions) with support for JCR.
We have decided to give Alfresco an opportunity to be the recommended JCR product.
The Alfresco version used is 3b, and so is also the SDK we downloaded.
The database we use is MySQL and Tomcat is the server.
We made some JSP tags that fetches content from the repository that has been added thru the Alfresco Web Client.

… and then to the point:

By running both (Web Client and our web app) at the same time for some days, we first lost the 'admin' credential (Web Client says: Unable to login - unknown username/password). We had earlier created our own userid, but some days later it also stopped to work with the same error message.

In custom-repository.properties we have defined for both:
   index.recovery.mode=FULL
because the indexes (in C:\Alfresco\alf_data) does not seem to keep in sync otherwise between these two apps.

What could be the reason why these userids got lost?
How could we get them valid again? (deleting C:\Alfresco\alf_data and restarting does not help)
How should we define index.recovery.mode for Web Client and for our web app?

Regards,
Juha

[mrogers]

I have never heard of the admin password getting lost.    However login does seem to require the lucene indexes so there can be a short delay while the indexes are built before login works.

Deleting C:\Alfresco\alf_data will have removed your content as well as lucene indexes so to recover you will also need to drop your database and create an empty schema and start from an empty repository.      I'd also recommend you learn to back up your system so you can restore from backup rather than loosing your content.

Has your system been corrupted by someone changing the contents of alf_data?    Certainly when you attempted to recover by deleting alf_data then you smashed your instance of Alfresco.

index.recovery.mode=FULL is used to rebuild the lucene indexes after problems, it will slow down a normal restart if it is left on.

[rajakari]

Losing admin credentials has now happened twice, after the first crash I recreated the DB and deleted alf_data.

You asked if someone has changed the contents of alf_data: I'm running Alfresco on my development machine, so the only one I can think of (besides Alfresco Server and our web app) is Alfresco Labs SDK FirstJCRClient, which I ran in Eclipse Debugging mode. Sometimes these debugging JVM processes were not killed, so they could have left something open and thereby mess up something in the DB or alf_data. FirstJCRClient also has index.recovery.mode=FULL

I guess we should use index.recovery.mode=AUTO on Alfresco Server and our web app?