First, a really big thank you to this board overall, and to Danielle in particular, for providing super helpful information about Joomla configuration. It makes me really value being hosted by Lunarpages.

My current dilemma: After having spent a good part of the day yesterday working on my Joomla site, I took a break and when i came back, had to login to the admin panel (just the normal thing), but when i typed in my admin name and password, nothing changed on the page, but the URL switched to read:

http://www.mysite.com/administrator/index.php?mosmsg=You%20need%20to%20login

In other words, I could not login to access the admin panel -- I was (and am still) just stuck in this loop. On the front end, however, all was/is still fine!!!

So that has set me on a long (very very very long) path to trying to fix this problem. Not being a hard core developer, the information available is a bit overwhelming. There are LOTS of people out there who seem to be having the same problem -- any Google search will confirm that for you -- but the answers I'm seeing posted aren't clear to me. I'm hoping (praying!) that someone here can help. I will return the favor if I can.

Here is the most "helpful" post I've found:
http://dev.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,33/p,105/

Note that it concludes: "This problem is caused by unwritable session save path. Chmod phptemp and this’ll be fixed." .....I cannot find phptemp anywhere, although i do see a tmp folder with permissions set to 700. Do I need to change the permissions on this file? Am I allowed to?

Another page that was (sort of) helpful was:
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,57553.0.html

But again, I don't quite know how to proceed. I would be truly truly grateful if someone out there had a suggestion -- at the moment I am completely blocked from the admin end of my site.

Specific questions:
- Do I need to edit my php.ini file? If so, what code should I add?
- Do I need to edit my configuration.php file? If so, how?
- Do I need to edit the permissions on the tmp folder at the root? If so, with what permissions?
- Or do I need to create a different tmp folder somewhere? (what permissions?)
- If none of the above, what then?

Thanks in advance -
difflo2

After tearing my hair out trying to solve this issue where remotely (on my hosted webpage) everything worked okay but on a local install, i was getting the dreaded mosmsg=You%20need%20to%20login issue, - the session directory was writeable and I could see session data appearing, the above post made me check my cookie handling.  All seemed to be okay, but I'm a ZoneAlarm user and though I was allowing all cookies, I had the Ad Blocking on (on the panel below the cookie handling options) - which on the face of it shouldn't make a difference, but it does.  Disabling ad blocking allows me to log in to the administration screen.  bonkers.

Hope this helps someone and saves them the 2 hours of wasted time that I had.