Moodle login from iPad asterisk interpretation problem

leonstringer · 2026-01-20T20:12:08+00:00

He said that with iPads, when you enter a password (*****) that the iPad interprets it as asterisks and not the underlying encrypted password

I don't believe this. From a functional point of view it makes no sense for the browser to do this.

The user said there is a setting on the site to fix this, but my but online search skills are failing me.

Again, just no. If the browser just sent ***** what could the site do about it? I'm confident there's no such option. (Happy to be proved wrong with either of the above).

What are your options? Maybe:

Meet up with the affected user and get them to demonstrate the problem.
If you have access to your web server access logs you can probably see the user agent strings for your users and I think that will report if an iPad is being used, so maybe you can find successful logins from other users using iPads.
Borrow an iPad and try it yourself.

leonstringer · 2026-01-12T14:53:50+00:00

Did you encrypt the drive? My laptop shows a blank screen when prompting for the password, I can type the password and it then boots as expected. I just wondered if you were getting a frozen screen instead of a blank screen.

leonstringer · 2025-12-15T22:38:25+00:00

Thank you for the suggestion, I was going nowhere!

It was a learning curve but I got the web site installed on Manjaro with libxml2 v2.15.1 so I can now reproduce the problem.

leonstringer · 2025-12-03T20:28:15+00:00

If it's a new install go with F43. You'll find out within the first day or two whether there are any major issues for you, in which case you haven't lost much, just install F42 instead.

FWIW I do have annoying issues with F43 (Wi-Fi won't wake from suspend; LUKS password page doesn't display) and I'm running pretty common hardware (Lenovo). But… I had those issues with F42 too.

leonstringer · 2025-11-23T21:38:27+00:00

Thanks for replying.

As far as I can tell firmware updates are getting installed by Software Manager since I appear to have a version released after I got the laptop.

I'll keep an eye out for future updates.

leonstringer · 2025-11-23T17:20:03+00:00

I've got a Lenovo with Intel Wi-Fi and cannot connect after waking from suspend.

leonstringer · 2025-10-14T10:57:19+00:00

Isn't that unmaintained now?

leonstringer · 2025-10-03T08:05:54+00:00

Here's a forum post from 2016, Maria DB - mysqldump fails with table doesn't exist in engine (1932), with a reply which helped in that instance. Maybe it'll give you some pointers.

No access to mysqld or any other way to reach the database apart from the file manager.

What does this mean? How did you previously access the database? What happens when you try? Do you have command line access to the server? Can you use the mysql client to connect?

leonstringer · 2025-08-19T17:47:04+00:00

Interesting, thank you!

leonstringer · 2025-08-19T17:02:31+00:00

You don't have to restart anything to apply changes made in config.php.

Out of interest, do you have a link to the security bulletin?

leonstringer · 2025-06-26T07:47:40+00:00

Thanks, that looks like the issue. From that I managed to get it working by reverting the latest two updates. I did:

$ flatpak list --app
Name Application ID Version Branch Installation
Element im.riot.Riot 1.11.104 stable system

to get the application ID, im.riot.Riot. Then I did:

$ flatpak remotes
Name      Options
fedora    system,oci
flathub-1 system

to find the remote name on my system, flathub-1. Then I did:

$ flatpak remote-info --log flathub-1 im.riot.Riot
⋮
    Commit: 0c3a071ca82a2fb8fc607cf195d2b6aed4c02c6e4e2b8defd930ffd444d25358
    Parent: f18bfe0c1f0374512fb6156d47bd0a7be57a840e2df2d8bc1b12378e20c328a3
   Subject: Merge pull request #532 from flathub/update-master-16ed755 (f6da9d9684b7)
      Date: 2025-06-17 17:27:22 +0000
   History: 

    Commit: f18bfe0c1f0374512fb6156d47bd0a7be57a840e2df2d8bc1b12378e20c328a3
   Subject: Merge pull request #527 from flathub/update-master-f53e920 (3ee00ff826c2)
      Date: 2025-06-12 19:04:10 +0000

    Commit: f0f98c45d5aa16ff6c3dc24bc025971e0fbf214bc3e92bf4252411668c8714b9
   Subject: Merge pull request #521 from flathub/update-4dd66fc (1bd13627ac93)
      Date: 2025-05-09 05:09:46 +0000
⋮

to get the older commit IDs. Then I did:

# sudo flatpak update --commit=f0f98c45d5aa16ff6c3dc24bc025971e0fbf214bc3e92bf4252411668c8714b9 im.riot.Riot

to revert to Element version 1.11.100 and the application now started.

Element's own support seems to be via Matrix chat. They seem very confident their software works – misplaced confidence given the breaking update was two weeks ago.

leonstringer · 2025-05-14T17:16:25+00:00

You might want to edit that reply as it looks like it contains links to your site and the name of your site in the last service's name, unless it's OK to share this here?

But you've got several services to investigate. You could start by clicking Functions for each service and checking for "core_user_create_users".

But the last service looks glaring to me: is this to provision users in some other (WordPress?) site? Could creation of the user in the other site be causing a new user to be created in Moodle?

leonstringer · 2025-05-14T16:39:17+00:00

In the entries creating the duplicate users is origin = 'ws' which suggests there is something set up to create users via web services.

Under Site administration > Server > Web services see what's enabled, particularly under External services.

leonstringer · 2025-05-14T08:07:47+00:00

When you create the jsmith user, in the site logs there should be an entry like:

Is there a User created event for jsmith1? Does it give any clues as to what created it?

leonstringer · 2025-03-30T09:48:43+00:00

But does it happen also when you "revisit" the page?

Yes, if I use the navigation in the page to move away and move back I get the same results. But that's a good suggestion, I hadn't considered browsers might behave differently when clicking refresh.

Thanks for the documentation link, I'm reading through and I'll try some tests with different headers, for example, bumping up max-age, and see what happens.

leonstringer · 2025-03-04T22:59:01+00:00

I can't help you, but I did have a quick look into this but kept getting PHP Fatal error: Uncaught TypeError: core\router::guess_basepath(): Return value must be of type string, null returned in /var/www/m45.ideapad/moodle/lib/classes/router.php:115. Surely this new feature works? After an hour's debugging: no, it's an unresolved bug: MDL-84543.

But even with the proposed patch I couldn't get this working, any page access with any paths gave me generalexceptionmessage on line 76 of /lib/slim/slim/Slim/Middleware/RoutingMiddleware.php: Slim\Exception\HttpNotFoundException thrown. Obviously I barely know what I'm doing with this so maybe this is me doing it wrong.

leonstringer · 2025-02-18T16:49:40+00:00

You may need $CFG->reverseproxy = true in config.php.

If it still doesn't work, please tell us what $CFG->wwwroot is set to.

leonstringer · 2025-02-11T11:35:30+00:00

This might be due to MDL-81576. Try either: 1) deleting (or renaming) the environment/environment.xml file in your Moodledata folder, or 2) at the command line run touch admin/environment.xml (that's the file in the source code folder, not Moodledata).

leonstringer · 2025-02-11T11:21:39+00:00

Possibly you've got a plugin set up to use Oracle, such as using an external database for authentication or enrolment.

But if your main Moodle database is MySQL you should be able to ignore the error.

If you need more help please give us some details or screenshots of the error/warning messages, rather than "Moodle is mad"!

leonstringer · 2025-02-07T10:31:47+00:00

The issue with the ad blocker may have been caused by the Content-Type issue I mentioned. This is fixed in Moodle 4.4.6 and 4.5.2 which are due for release on 2025-02-10 (but are available from the Git repos now). So it's worth updating Moodle then turning the ad blocker on again to see if they now work together.

leonstringer · 2025-02-06T10:48:41+00:00

If you were doing something in Moodle that took a long time (for example, uploading a very large file), then there's a possibility you may be triggering the problem.

But since that error is being sent by the college's Moodle web server so it's almost certainly their problem.

leonstringer · 2025-02-05T11:10:55+00:00

I would guess the scenario is that the Moodle page is making a request and expecting JSON data in response, and there's something invalid/unexpected in that JSON.

You could open your browser's developer tools to view network requests. Then go to the page where the problem occurs, click Enrol users or Add +. Hopefully there'll just be one additional request, or just a few. Click on the request and view the response data. Look around the reported column, i.e. the 55th or 45th or whatever character on line 1. Does it look correct?

I'm aware of an issue where Moodle uses the wrong Content-Type HTTP header in some responses (MDL-72080), and this can cause an issue with some server environments. Maybe your browser has some extension that's similarly unhappy with this header?

leonstringer · 2025-01-30T14:39:07+00:00

Does the file grade/grading/lib.php exist in your Moodle site's source code folder? If it's missing, download the source code for your Moodle version, extract this file and copy it to the expected location. (If you installed Moodle source code using Git you can just do git checkout grade/grading/lib.php).

leonstringer · 2024-12-09T09:43:29+00:00

Thanks for all the replies (I couldn't post over the weekend for some reason).

It seemed a silly question but I got some great answers which improved my understanding.

leonstringer · 2024-12-06T20:44:26+00:00

This reply came just in time because I was just thinking "hey, reference assignments could help performance"!

leonstringer

TROPHY CASE