Failure to Login as Admin after initial installation
If the configuration in an Apache 2 installation is not correct with respect to the naming of the sites-enabled and sites-available entries in the /etc/apache2 configuration subdirectories, the sessions become messed up and this prevents login without any errors for diagnosis.
Thus, if you are installing fresh and encountering a situation where you cannot login with your admin user, check the Apache configuration to ensure that all naming is aligned as so:
>ls /etc/apache2/sites-available
drupal
>ls -l /etc/apache2/sites-enabled
000-drupal -> /etc/apache2/sites-available/drupal
and NOT
drupal -> /etc/apache2/sites-available/drupal
OR
000-default -> /etc/apache2/sites-available/drupal
Also ensure that your apache configuration file looks something like:
NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@<your domain>
DocumentRoot /var/www/drupal
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/drupal>
Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/drupal_error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/drupal_access.log combined
ServerSignature On
</VirtualHost>and your /etc/apache2/ports.conf looks as follows (at least this entry):
Listen 80