Support

We looked into the crash you attached. The error, COM_ADMINTOOLS_ERR_INVALID_RESTRICTIP, happens because Admin Tools' .htaccess Maker offers "Sucuri" as one of the sources for the "Restrict access by IP" option. When you selected it, Admin Tools tried to fetch Sucuri's currently published IP ranges from their documentation page in real time. In your case that fetch did not return any usable data, and instead of failing gracefully, Admin Tools threw an unhandled error and wrote out a broken .htaccess file, which is what locked you out. There is also a labelling bug in the same code path that made the error message show a raw, untranslated code instead of a readable sentence, which is why the message you saw made little sense.

We have fixed this in our development branch:

• A failure to retrieve the Sucuri IP list no longer crashes the page or writes a broken .htaccess; it now shows a proper warning and leaves your existing configuration untouched.
• The mistranslated error message has been corrected.
• We also shortened how long a failed fetch is cached, so a temporary hiccup won't keep blocking you from saving for a full hour afterwards.

This fix is included in today's developer's release, which you're welcome to test:

https://www.akeeba.com/download/admin-tools-professional/7-9-0-dev202607200840-reve1d7aa80/pkg-admintools-7-9-0-dev202607200840-reve1d7aa80-pro-zip.zip

Please note this is a developer's release, not an official version, so it will not appear in your site's automated update checks and should only be installed manually for testing. Before you try the "Sucuri" option again, please take a fresh backup of your current .htaccess file (Admin Tools does keep automatic backups of the previous file in .htaccess Maker, but a manual copy is a good extra safeguard). If the option still doesn't work as expected, or if you'd rather not experiment with it right now, you can safely leave "Restrict access by IP" set to "None" — the rest of Admin Tools' protection features are unaffected by this issue.

Let us know how the test goes.