linux - How can I get my mediawiki to stop thinking I have cookies disabled?

I've searched half a day for how to resolve this issue, and can't figure it out. Shortly after I made my wiki a simple private wiki according to the instructions at Mediawiki's website, it started giving me this weird login error message: Wiki uses cookies to log in users. You have cookies disabled. Please enable them and try again.

If I remove those private wiki settings, the error disappears, even if I try logging in. But I need it to be a private wiki for only my team. So what do I do?

Here's what I've done so far. Just to be safe, after ever change, I try rebooting Apache using:

• sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

In my php.ini file, I have the following set:

• session.save_path = "/var/lib/php5"


• session.cookie_secure = secure


• session.cookie_path = /tmp session.cookie_domain = my server's internal URL (should I even set this? this field was blank before, but not commented out)



• session.referer_check = Off

I ran the following to ensure that the folders are writable:

• sudo chmod -R 1777 /var/lib/php5


• sudo chmod -R 1777 /tmp

In my LocalSettings.php file, I have the following added to the bottom of the settings file:

• session_save_path("tmp");


• $wgSessionsInObjectCache = true;


• $wgMainCacheType = CACHE_ANYTHING;


• $wgDebugToolbar = true;


• $wgDebugLogFile='/var/log/mediawiki/mediawiki.log';


• $wgShowExceptionDetails = true;


• $wgShowDebug = true;



• $wgDevelopmentWarnings = true;

For the above tmp, I created the folder /etc/mediawiki/tmp and also ran the following:

• sudo chmod -R 1777 /etc/mediawiki/tmp

I know that the cookie is coming through to the browser because I can see the cookie in Firebug and verify that the same cookie got created in the /tmp folder.

SSL seems to be configured properly, because I get the green lock.

This is my debug output after trying to log in:

Debug data:

• Start request





• POST /mediawiki/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&action=submitlogin&type=login&returnto=Special:RecentChanges



• HTTP HEADERS:


• HOST: bs-wiki.sis.org.cn


• CONNECTION: keep-alive


• CONTENT-LENGTH: 122


• CACHE-CONTROL: max-age=0


• ACCEPT: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,/;q=0.8


• ORIGIN: https://bs-wiki.sis.org.cn


• UPGRADE-INSECURE-REQUESTS: 1


• USER-AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.97 Safari/537.36



• CONTENT-TYPE: application/x-www-form-urlencoded


• DNT: 1


• REFERER: https://bs-wiki.sis.org.cn/mediawiki/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&returnto=Special%3ARecentChanges&returntoquery=


• ACCEPT-ENCODING: gzip, deflate


• ACCEPT-LANGUAGE: en-US,en;q=0.8



• COOKIE: __gads=ID=f46767e352615a06:T=1453974579:S=ALNI_MaImAtsIj8Xb-3kERZtmSWx82DxNA; bs_wikiUserName=Rpark1; bs_wikiLoggedOut=20160128105049; bs_wiki_session=3fck92pn1uq1l1s852oq6rfdl3




• CACHES: SqlBagOStuff[main] SqlBagOStuff[message] SqlBagOStuff[parser]



• Connecting to localhost bs_wiki...


• Profiler::instance called without $wgProfiler['class'] set, falling back to ProfilerStub for safety


• Connected to localhost bs_wiki.



• Connecting to localhost bs_wiki...


• Connected to localhost bs_wiki.


• DatabaseBase::query: Writes done: DELETE FROM objectcache WHERE keyname = 'bs_wiki:stats:request_with_session'


• LocalisationCache: using store LCStore_DB


• Unstubbing $wgParser on call of $wgParser::setFunctionHook from unknown


• Parser: using preprocessor: Preprocessor_DOM


• Fully initialised


• Unstubbing $wgAuth on call of $wgAuth::validDomain from unknown


• IP: 172.18.12.59


• MessageCache::load: Loading en... got from global cache



• Unstubbing $wgLang on call of $wgLang::_unstub from unknown


• MWCryptRand::realGenerate: Generating cryptographic random bytes for LoginForm::setLoginToken/MWCryptRand::generateHex/MWCryptRand::realGenerateHex/MWCryptRand::generate/MWCryptRand::realGenerate


• MWCryptRand::realGenerate: openssl_random_pseudo_bytes generated 16
  bytes of strong randomness.


• MWCryptRand::realGenerate: 0 bytes of
  randomness leftover in the buffer.


• Class SkinVector not found; skipped loading


• Class PEAR_Error not found; skipped loading

Answer

No idea why it works now, but started from scratch and went back to the original instructions at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Preventing_access#Simple_private_wiki and now it works.

Well, not completely from scratch, I didn't revert my changes to php.ini. So not sure whether or not that fixed it. Either way, it's working now, and so I'm happy.... :)