[TYPO3-linux] Cannot login to backend panel on a new install

[Chris Jensen]

Hello!

I am utterly baffled by a problem that I am facing with my new Typo3 
install, and, after searching through the documentation, the typo3 wiki 
and the newsgroups, I'm thinking that the members of this mailing-list 
might be my only hope.

Here is the issue:
We (my site administrator and I) have created a mySQL user and DB, we 
unpacked the Typo3 tar file as per the wiki.typo3.org Installation 
Basics document, and we ran the 1-2-3-GO configuration and received no 
errors messages on the install tool's Advanced Configuration screens. 
However, the backend login at http://typo3.mn-s.ca/typo3/index.php 
generates the following error:

"Your login attempt did not succeed. Make sure to spell your username 
and password correctly, including upper/lowercase characters."

MySQL shows the user ID is 'admin' and the password hash corresponds to 
the MD5 of 'password'. This is precisely what we tried to use to log on 
to the backend.

We tried creating new DB users with the Install Tool (and verified that 
those users were being created by checking out the be_users table in the 
database using phpMyADmin), but those users cannot log in to the backend 
either. Same error message.

Our configuration:
Plesk 9.2.1
CentOS 5.3
Apache 2.2.3 (PHP run as FastCGI)
PHP 5.1.6 (safe_mode=off)
MySQL 5.0.45 (sql-mode="")

We are running Typo3 in a Plesk created subdomain.

Even though we are running PHP 5.1, we still began with the newest 
version of Typo3 because the forums stated that compatibility shouldn't 
be a problem:

"If you are using PHP 5.1 then you might be in luck... We are aware that 
enterprise Linux distributions of Novell and RedHat do not ship with PHP 
5.2 yet (they both come with 5.1). Therefore, we will avoid using PHP 
5.2 any specific features in TYPO3 as long as they have not switched."
(http://buzz.typo3.org/people/stucki/article/leaving-php4-behind/)

However, the problems pushed us to try Typo3 4.1.10 in spite of the 
above statement. Unfortunately, these issues persisted in this version 
as well.

As an aside, we tried the various fixes suggested in this forum post 
(http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=4003) but none of them worked either.

Does anyone have any idea what the problem could be? After reviewing all 
of the CMS options out there, it really seems like Typo3 would be best 
for our organization, but we can't even begin testing it (and learning 
its intricacies) until we can login into the backend.

Thank you in advance for any advice you could offer.

-Chris