Drupal 7 access denied to admin panel - drupal

Question

Migrated a fully-functioning Drupal 7 site and corresponding database to a new server. I am unable to login to the admin side. The error message is: “Access Denied. You are not authorized to access this page.” The username and password has been verified.
I looked at /admin/reports/dblog, the error log shows 2 entries per login. One entry shows the session is opened for the correct username, and the other entry shows access denied and the user is ‘anonymous.’ It is my assumption that Drupal is not able to validate the user so it is assigning the user as anonymous.
I read many forum topics on similar issues. I commented out the ‘$cookie_domain’ in ‘settings.php’, but still nothing. I looked back at the functioning site and saw that 2 cookies are generated: ‘has_js’ and a session ID cookie. In the new site, only the ‘has_js’ cookie is generated (using both Firefox and Chrome browsers). I have verified that the session id is being saved to the session table in the database.
I have looked into modifying ‘php.ini’ (etc/php5/apache2/php.ini) but have not found a solution that saves the session id cookie.
Drupal 7
Linux Server
Ubuntu 12.04
Apache 2.2.22
MySql 14.14
PHP 5.3.10

Answer 1

Uncomment line 340 on settings.php to reflect your domain name
e.g. for localhost
$cookie_domain = 'localhost';
Please note this works for drupal 7 and my php version is 5.6.
Regards,

Answer 2

When migrating drupal installations from server to another there is several problems that could appear.
1) check your file permissions, because sometimes we migrate files from server to another and having different owner:group and this gives serious problems.
2) You need to delete all cache before migrating to avoid having access problems and using wrong urls from cache and so on, in your case you already migrated Drupal, so you need to go to the DB and delete content of all cache_* databases. this could help you.
3) if not you need to look at what php version you have been using and mysql and apache maybe some deprecated functions or so.

Answer 3

I had the same problem, except that I could see the session cookie in Chrome (Settings -> Show Advanced Settings -> Content Settings -> All Site Cookies and Data). The cookie's "Send for" property was set to "Secure Connections Only" and my site was running up on HTTP / port 80. Thus the browser would not send the cookie back to the web.
The problem turned out to be this line in php.ini: session.cookie_secure = 1
When this option is set, PHP will specify that the cookie may only be sent over a secure (HTTPS) connection. This makes it harder to mount a man-in-the-middle attack because the cookie is no longer sent via clear text.
There are two ways to resolve the issue: 1) Switch the site to HTTPS. 2) In php.ini, set session.cookie_secure = 0

Answer 4

I had the same problem. Number 3 from the first answer saved me - I'd recently changed my MAMP PHP version to 5.6 and this seemed to be causing the issue. Reverting back to 5.5 means I can now login.