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Admin Tools

#39874 There were errors trying to save the Web Application Firewall's configuration

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
4.3.4
PHP version
8.1.25
Admin Tools version
7.4.4 PRO

Latest post by deeno on Friday, 24 November 2023 04:51 CST

deeno

Dear team,

after migrating staging to live, enabling AdminTools by renaming provider.php, we get an error pointing to the setting "Allowed domains" of the WAF were we need to change "new.domain.com" (staging site) to "www.domain.com" (live site) - which we did. But it is not saving the configuration with the error "There were errors trying to save the Web Application Firewall's configuration." and keeps reverting to "new.domain.com" - thus AdminTools not working. See as well the attached screenshot. Any idea?

All best,

Konstantinos

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

Your Secret URL Parameter is invalid. Please scroll to that line and read the help text below it to understand the minimum and maximum length, and the permitted characters in it.

The following are invalid:

  • abc
  • supercalifragilisticexpialidocioussupercaliflawjalisticeexpialadoshus
  • 3birdsonafence
  • καλημέρα
  • d@nc3R!

The following are valid:

  • G3-A3
  • knockKNOCK
  • yJ8zrExTTLfgRcceqrttnpvTs9tSHJpW

Most likely your secret word is too short, starts with a number / special character, or includes characters other than a-Z, 0-9, dashes, and underscores.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

deeno

Right!

It was starting with a special character...

Have there been changes recently?
Because we are usually using a clone of a setup since 1 year for new websites, where the secret word was already defined and there were no problems since yet... Strange.

Thanks anyway!

Καλό σαββατοκύριακο

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

Yes, we added the rules for the secret URL parameter in the last version, indeed.

Apparently, a stark but rather, uh, vociferous minority of people would neither read the documentation, nor accept that special characters have special meaning (hence their name) in URLs. Having already tried putting warnings to the blatantly obvious – like the bag of mixed nuts you buy in the grocery store has a warning "MAY CONTAIN NUTS" printed on it – the next step was to actively forbid the use of any even remotely possibly problematic secret URL parameter at all. I have to tell you, every time I have to do something like that I die a little bit on the inside...

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

deeno

I see, thanks for clarifying!

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