For the last week I've been trying to fix an issue with the TypeKey login. Initially I was alerted by a commenter to the problem and it turned out I didn't have the website configured properly with TypeKey. The web address needs to have a trailing slash, ie http://www.sitename.com/. Once I corrected that, it worked.
Then a couple of days later when I logged in I was met with the upgrade screen, though I didn't think anything had changed, and as far as I could tell, everything was okay. But then I was alerted again to the fact that the TypeKey login wasn't working. So for 3 solid days I read everything I could about TypeKey login problems, changed settings, reset keys, even set up a new authentication key and nothing made a difference. The Sixapart forum must have put this one in the too hard basket because I got no response from the post I added.
An error occurred: The sign-in validation failed.Pretty vague error. I searched using Google and came up with an error response in the comment.pm file that said:
# Signature didn't match, or timestamp was out of date.
# This implies tampering, not a user mistake.
return $app->error($app->translate("The sign-in validation failed."));
Six Apart's Knowledge Base had an article on TypeKey errors that explained what to do in the event of this particular error, though it didn't help. I tried testing the timestamp issue, and that seemed to be okay. As for the advice on changing links in the template, since it related to MT3.2 it wasn't really applicable.
Around this time too my MT install was getting really sluggish. It was taking forever to log in and to go from one screen to another. This made me think there was a problem with the latest update, namely the 4.21 update, and so I updated again, just to make sure there wasn't any problem. When I updated, I didn't even get the upgrade screen, so I assumed that was a wasted exercise.
The next stop was the activity log to see if any errors were recorded there. All my failed login attempts were recorded here, along with a couple of commenter's failed attempts, but no real clues as to the problem. I even checked the errors against the TypeKey API to see if there was a problem somewhere there, but everything seemed right. By now, around day 3, I'm pretty frustrated and greatly bit pissed off, so then I head to the server error logs to see what I can see.
Wow, lots of mod-rewrite errors.
[Thu Sep 25 01:56:25 2008] [error] [client 74.6.17.151] Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use 'LimitInternalRecursion' to increase the limit if necessary. Use 'LogLevel debug' to get a backtrace.
[Thu Sep 25 01:57:10 2008] [error] [client 74.6.17.151] mod_rewrite: maximum number of internal redirects reached. Assuming configuration error. Use 'RewriteOptions MaxRedirects' to increase the limit if necessary.
Next I check out the htaccess file in the root folder and there's a mile of MT specific code. So I delete all that. None of my other websites have it so I figure I'm not doing anything drastic to the install. And what do you know? I try to log in with a TypeKey username to comment and it works. Relief.
I could have just disabled the TypeKey authentication and not worried that it didn't work but that's not how I play. Dammit... I wanted everything just right. No errors. No problems. And so I persisted until I found the problem. So if you ever you have that particular TypeKey error, you might try looking at you htaccess file in the root folder and see what MT has added. It might be the culprit.
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