Table prefix change leading to problems?

Hi!

I've followed these instructions ( magazine.joomla.org/issues/Issue-Aug-2010/item/108-the-prefix-has-nothing-to-do-with-telephony ) to strengthen the security of Joomla and I think I may have stumbled across a problem. Three users have registered to the site after the change but there are no lines for them in [prefix]_users or [prefix]_comprofiler tables. These users can be seen in CB user management and Joomla user management but the users first, second and lastname fields stay blank in CB user management. Has anyone else come across this one? Or how to debug this?

My site uses latest Joomla 1.5 and CB 1.3 (just updated to 1.3.1). CB Privacy, CB Contacts and CB Captcha also installed.

The configuration file should not be moved if this step was performed, please reverse it.. it does not harden security.

The database prefix if changed from jos_ during the installation process to say 123_ should work perfectly fine as CB is not prefix specific. CB uses the universal prefix of #__ which will be replaced by the configured prefix.

I recommend reversing all the security changes you've performed. You must test your installation without the security additions to ensure that's the actual cause. As appears the users are created with an ID, but their other information is not stored which could be a configuration issue with fields instead.

Once done Re-add the security 1 by 1 and testing very thoroughly after adding them. I would not make such changes to a live site where you have active users; perform and test in a development environment.

I've noticed the effect of changing the configuration file location much earlier and that's not the case here.

The users have atleast full name, email and username stored somewhere, but definately not any custom fields. And there are no tables prefixed jos_ in the database.

This can be caused by:
- the mentioned change in database prefix
- creating a new superadmin and removing the old ones rights
- any of the CB updates during november-december

These causes are rather difficult do undo and did not cause any immediately visible problems in my testing environment.

These causes are rather difficult do undo and did not cause any immediately visible problems in my testing environment.

The 3 steps you listed above won't cause any problems. Changing prefix is a part of Joomlas core. As long as you did not change AFTER installation there shouldn't be any issues. Changing admin users isn't an issue either as the admin userid is not hardcoded in any way. Moving the configuration file will guarantee problems however so do not recommend that step.

Not quite sure what is causing the missing data. You need to ensure users are registering through CB and not through Joomla as they won't have data in CBs database. You can synchronize your users through CB Tools.

krileon wrote:

As long as you did not change AFTER installation there shouldn't be any issues.

Herein lies the problem then. The link I posted describes exactly that: changing the database prefix after installing Joomla. So you're saying CB is one of those components that can't handle it? Is there any other way to recover than:
a) revert to the original prefix or
b) revert to a backup before the change?

Looks like you used an older buggy version of a migration or backup-restore tool which replaced systematically #__ by jos_ in the table dumps.

Check jos_comprofiler_fields MySQL table, values of the column "table":

They should be starting with #__ and not with jos_ or whatever hardcoded prefix.