Few questions about Simple Firewall and multisite

  • Resolved Axel13

    (@axel13)


    9 years, 4 months ago

    Hi Paul,

    I never thought I’d move away from Wordfence, but I read a lot about Simple Firewall, liked the sound, your article on the misinformation virus makes a lot of sense and I wanted 2-factor authentication for all, but subscribers, so I gave your plugin a try.

    There is a lot I like about the plugin, but on multisite it requires to authenticate for every site separately. That is a bit of a problem.
    — 1. Is there a way to avoid this?

    Also, when trying to login again through the main site instead “Firewall Trigger: Leading Schema” was triggered due to “offending parameter redirect_to”. The same happened when saving changes to a page. It’s stated to be prone to problems, but it would not have been clear without the audit trail viewer. Suggestion: Perhaps something like “When you get locked out, this should be the first to turn off” would be helpful to others.

    Either way, it leads to a feature request.
    — 2. The error message when getting locked out is not very helpful to members. It would be great to be able to change that and totally awesome if it would be possible to add some style to it too.

    While I’m at it, one more question…

    — 3. I noticed you are very familiar with Cloudflare. Cloudflare recommends to whitelist their IP’s. Is it indeed recommended to do so in the firewall?

    Thank you for your help!

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-simple-firewall/

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Thread Starter Axel13

    (@axel13)

    Update: I did not try to authenticate on other sites yet. It’s not working. After clicking the auth link, I’m not logged in, instead I get a 404 error on /wp-admin.

    This also happened with the Rublon plugin, which I tried before, but it didn’t get solved. They also announced to add more restrictions on the free version and $99/y/site is not an option for me, so I moved on. But, since I do not see anyone else complaining, it could be a problem related my site.

    Thread Starter Axel13

    (@axel13)

    I think I’ve found the culprit. WPS Hide Login was still active. I did not deactivate it yet, since the login URL showed up correctly in the Simple Firewall’s Rename WP Login setting and this did not seem to be a problem.

    After deactivating the plugin I notice Rename WP Login is not compatible with multisite yet. So, Simple Firewall is probably not compatible with WPS Hide Login either. Deactivating, however, did not solve it yet.

    When trying to login I got redirected to [old login URL]/?wpsf-forcelogout=4&__domainmap_action=domainmap-logout-user, which shows a 404-page. It looked as if I was logged in, since the toolbar was visible. But when trying to reach the dashboard, I got redirected to the same URL, and the toolbar was gone.

    —
    Deactivated Jetpack Protect. (I only did that on the main site initially, and lost access…)
    Cleaned database with wp-Optimize.
    Removed all Simple Firewall settings.

    Activate Firewall
    Activate: Firewall – Include Cookies, WordPress Terms, PHP Code & Exe File Uploads.
    Test to see if subsites are still available – OK

    Enable Login Protection
    Test to see if subsites are still available – OK

    Test to see if I can login with a different account and reach the subsites – Nope.
    I still get redirected to [old login URL]/?wpsf-forcelogout=4&__domainmap_action=domainmap-logout-user.
    I however no longer get logged out and I can reach everything else, but not the dashboard + As far as I checked, the problem only occurs on one site.

    I’ll see if I find something in the database.
    Sorry to make it so long here!
    Suggestions are obviously welcome.

    Thread Starter Axel13

    (@axel13)

    I did not find anything that seems related in the database, but can ignore it, since it’s only on one site and I’m the only one using it. Moreover it only occurs when trying to reach /wp-admin (= toolbar link), while /wp-admin/index.php (sidebar link) does get me to the dashboard.

    2-factor auth, however, did not get solved with deactivating WPS Hide Login or Jetpack Protect. I seem to be able to use it on one site per account.

    With my main account I can use it on the main site, with a 2nd one I can use it on the site where I have the dashboard issue.

    Trying to login to get to another site leads to the login screen of that site and the following error shows:

    Your Two-Factor Authentication was un-verified or invalidated by a login from another location or browser.
    Please login again.
    Not a user.
    Please login again.

    When clicking the authentication link I end up on the login screen again.
    With one account and with one browser (Chrome) there is no error message and when trying to login a new auth link is sent.

    With another account and another browser (FireFox), I end up on the login screen again, with the quoted error message. When logging in again I see a message saying I will be redirected to the desired page, yet I end up on the login page again, with the same error message.

    In user management I see that the “Last Activity URI” of the second account is weird: /avatar/user-6-48.png and there is no data in “Logged In At” or “Last Activity At”.

    “Max Simultaneous Sessions” is set to zero (unlimited).

    Audit trail viewer shows a couple successful login, probably on the one site per user where it works, and for the rest:

    Event: login protect two factor unverified ip
    User: “[username]” was found to be un-verified at the given IP Address: “[my IP]”.

    I’m out of inspiration.
    Thank you for looking into this!

    Thread Starter Axel13

    (@axel13)

    Found some more inspiration: testing “Two-Factor Login Authentication By IP Address”…

    It’s an improvement, but it is still necessary to authenticate for every site separately, with dynamic IP’s that is far from practical and when clicking the auth link, I end up on the sub site’s login screen, where login fails: a message appears saying smth like “login was successful and you will be redirected…”, but it redirects back to the login screen (without error message – tried on Chrome).

    After logging in on the main site, however – here comes the improvement – I can reach the site I authenticated for.

    Thread Starter Axel13

    (@axel13)

    I turned off 2FA, yet still got logged out when trying to get to the admin of another site. The error message was:

    You do not currently have a WordPress Simple Firewall user session.
    Please login again.

    This solves when turning off user management.

    I then turned 2FA back on to see if that would perhaps solve the problem, but that’s not it. The symptoms remain the same.

    Thread Starter Axel13

    (@axel13)

    While not all problems are resolved, I will mark this thread as resolved, because it’s too chaotic.

    The current conclusion is that Simple Firewall is not entirely compatible with multisite yet:

    • User management causes problems and can best be turned off.
    • It’s not possible to change the login URL and it doesn’t help to use a different plugin for this.
    • 2FA can be used, but requires authentications for all sites seperately
    • When ‘Report Email’ is left empty reports are sent to the site admins, not to the network admin.
Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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