login always results in "403 Forbidden"

ullix · 2024-06-17T13:39:14+00:00

After using tvheadend with Kodi for over a decade I was forced to reinstall on a new computer, and then could no longer log in with localhost:9981. Every att...

ullix

I do, and it is of course exactly the same. But your suggestion is valid, and I'll give it a try!

ullix

Bummer; I could not even get to the Setup wizard :-(

I purged tvheadend with sudo apt purge tvheadend and installed tvheadend_4.3-2337~ge855f62e6~jammy_amd64.deb. During the install, as requested, I gave admin name and pw. Then on Firefox entered localhost:9981.

I was asked for username and password. It did NOT say admin, but at this point there is nothing else but admin credentials, so I entered those. It resulted in "403 Forbidden"!

I shut down all Firefoxes, and restarted, and entered localhost:9981. It asked again for user credentials, and this time I cancelled. It resulted in "401 Unauthorized". It also offered buttons for "Default login", and "New login", but this only goes in circles of 403 and 401 responses.

I repeated all this on browser Chromium. It gave the exact same result.

With the default installation I cannot even get to the point of entering anything to the tvh setup wizard!

My System:
Linux Mint 21.2; Codename: victoria; 6.5.0-35-generic #35₂₂.04.1-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue May 7 09:00:52 UTC 2 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

P.S.: looking at my filesystem I see that a user "hts" is NOT created, at least there aren't any files, not even hidden ones. In /etc/passwd there is an entry: hts:x:123:133::/var/lib/tvheadend:/usr/sbin/nologin

Jonas Lang

I blame the user when the user chooses not to follow well set out and defined installation and configuration instructions.

You are clearly going around in circles trying to resolve this issue. Remember you have the problem, I don’t and as nobody here responding can reproduce your issue look closer to home for the solution.

As you suggested in your response above arrogance is probably at the root of your issue.

ski007

I also had a problem with logging in to TVheadend by entering the password and login created during installation. This also affected Linux Mint (virginia) / Ubuntu 22.04.
It was so frustrating because I kept getting the message: 403 Forbidden despite correct installation and configuration. Unfortunately, this is some error of the Tvheadend program and installation on various Linux systems. In this case, the error probably concerns Linux Mint (Virginia) :-).
How did I fix it? ... as far as I remember, reinstalling the Tvheadend program even with the purge option does not help, but running the Tvheadend program from the root position in the terminal with the option did help:
--noacl means exactly
sudo tvheadent --noacl
After starting the program, I went through the configuration again, created a new password and login in tvheadend and surprisingly it worked and after restarting the system etc. I could log in to tvheadend... although I admit that sometimes, but very rarely, there is still an error and it doesn't want to let me in :-) . .. but just restart the browser and it's OK. Maybe this information will help you solve the problem. Maybe over time, developers will diagnose the problem and fix/improve the installation of Tvheadend on individual/different Linux systems :-)
Regards !

ullix

@ski007 your suggestion seems to be basically the same what @HD suggested in the first response post.

But what caught my attention was that it is on a system also based on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy). So is mine with Linux Mint 21.2; Codename: victoria. Is it for some reason distribution specific? Anyone getting the same failure on a different distribution?

I have done nothing but installing with GDebi installer, and then opening the browser on localhost:9981. That already was the end.

ski007

I installed tvheadend from the ppa repository... but as you can see, I also received this error :-)
https://launchpad.net/~mamarley/+archive/ubuntu/tvheadend-git

ullix

Just now I tried a different distribution on a different computer - and after installation of 4.3-2340~gc8435a098~bookworm opening localhost:9981 with admin credentials went perfectly well, showing the tvheadend setup wizard!

This "good" system:

~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Linuxmint
Description:	LMDE 6 (faye)
Release:	6
Codename:	faye

~$ uname -a
Linux Gen10 6.1.0-21-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.90-1 (2024-05-03) x86_64 GNU/Linux

It seemed to be failing on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy) based systems. Developers, can you have a look?

Jonas Lang

For anyone experiencing this problem you can of course build/compile your own version of TVH. There’s plenty of instructions on the forum outlining the process.

davep

I've tried installing tvheadend_4.3-2340_gc8435a098jammy_amd64.deb on an old laptop running Linux Mint:

lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Linuxmint
Description:	Linux Mint 21.3
Release:	21.3
Codename:	virginia

The installation worked as expected and after running through the setup wizard my admin and user logons worked. There were a few 401 and 403 errors but nothing I could pin down.

However after purging and reinstalling tvheadend I was stuck in a 403 loop; nothing worked. Looking in the /var/lib/tvheadend directory gave a clue. Normally the directory contains something like:

/var/lib/tvheadend# ls -l
total 40
drwx------ 2 hts video 4096 Jun 23 14:08 accesscontrol
drwx------ 2 hts video 4096 Jun 23 14:03 bouquet
drwx------ 2 hts video 4096 Jun 23 14:03 caclient
drwx------ 2 hts video 4096 Jun 23 14:03 codec
-rw------- 1 hts video 1756 Jun 23 14:09 config
drwx------ 3 hts video 4096 Jun 23 14:03 dvr
drwx------ 2 hts video 4096 Jun 23 14:08 passwd
drwx------ 2 hts video 4096 Jun 23 14:03 profile
drwxr-xr-x 2 hts hts   4096 Jun 23 14:03 recordings
-rw------- 1 hts hts     41 Jun 23 14:03 superuser

However after reinstallation I had

/var/lib/tvheadend# ls -al
total 20
drwxr-xr-x  4 root root  4096 Jun 23 15:15 .
drwxr-xr-x 72 root root  4096 Jun 23 15:15 ..
drwx------  3 hts  video 4096 Jun 23 15:15 .config
drwxr-xr-x  2 hts  hts   4096 Jun 23 15:15 recordings
-rw-------  1 hts  hts     41 Jun 23 15:15 superuser

Now apt purge deletes all files in tvheadend's home directory but it does not delete the tvheadend user, and it seems that the installation process is different if the hts user already exists. This could explain why the 403 behaviour has been hard to pin down.

DeltaMikeCharlie

davep Now apt purge deletes all files in tvheadend's home directory but it does not delete the tvheadend user, and it seems that the installation process is different if the hts user already exists. This could explain why the 403 behaviour has been hard to pin down.

I have been able to reproduce these results.

After purging and reinstalling, I got 403.

Deleting the user was not enough to restore functionality after reinstallation, the group also needed to be deleted.

sudo deluser -r hts

sudo groupdel video

Once that was done and I reinstalled, no more 403.

The group used by TVH is now daemon, rather than video so I'm not sure if this will have any implications.

HD

Pitching in again. I do like the civility practiced by most in this forum while trying
to get to an understanding of this annoying login issue. It seems you are concentrating your efforts
on to Linux OS, TVHeadend and Browser at the same time. I would welcome an overall view
of the inner workings of this install process. Not so much in mere technical terms as by debugging
and analyzing log files to trace its inner workings, but much more high-level.
It would help to get a grip on the why of all this.
Back to tech, this is my env:
donotob@RPITV:~ $ uname -a & tvheadend -v [1] 3747 Linux RPITV 6.6.31+rpt-rpi-v6 #1 Raspbian 1:6.6.31-1+rpt1 (2024-05-29) armv6l GNU/Linux tvheadend: version 4.3-2155~gfe4df311d [1]+ Done uname -a donotob@RPITV:~ $
I'm running a 32-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS on Pi Zero 1.1 hardware. As you probably know
this OS is based on Debian directly, no Ubuntu in-between. My version of tvheadend is a bit behind
the latest version ( 4.3-2340_gc8435a098bookworm ) uploaded to cloudsmith.io by Flole.

Right now though I'm satisfied with this version because of the workaround, but I will keep track
of your efforts to solve the issue in this forum thread.

DeltaMikeCharlie

DaveH Deleting the video group may not be terribly sensible. There are things other than TVH that use it!

DeltaMikeCharlie I'm not sure if this will have any implications.

Agreed.

ullix

I can confirm @DeltaMikeCharlie 's results giving success on my very system that gave only 403's:

purging tvheadend
sudo deluser -r hts
sudo groupdel video
sudo groupdel hts
installing tvheadend_4.3-2337~ge855f62e6~jammy_amd64.deb
localhost:9981
filling out setup wizard

on system: Linux Mint 21.2, Codename: victoria, 6.5.0-35-generic #35~22.04.1-Ubuntu

DeltaMikeCharlie

ullix I can confirm @DeltaMikeCharlie 's results giving success on my very system that gave only 403's:

I'm not sure if this is good news or not.

Have you been able to confirm my findings and it is still giving you 403?
or
Have you been able to confirm my findings and it is no longer giving you 403?

ullix

Sorry for having been unclear: it works! I am now reaching the Setup Wizard! (I haven't gone through any further)

DeltaMikeCharlie

ullix Sorry for having been unclear: it works!

Congratulations.

Also, thanks to @davep who identified the reinstallation issue.

We still need to get to the bottom of this. It sounds like maybe the 'purge' mechanism within in the DEB package is not purging everything. Maybe, the installation process is not working correctly if certain conditions are met.

I have created a new GitHub issue:
tvheadend/tvheadend1722

DaveH

Deleting the video group may not be terribly sensible. There are things other than TVH that use it!

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