A client contacted me today unable to login into her Magento site via the admin panel. There hadn’t been any recent changes to the db or files, but every time she tried to login entering a correct username and password the page would just reset.
Magento Session Cookies
After a bit of Googling it appears that this is due to Magento “not being able to set or read the session cookie”. Not being able to write to session files, could be caused by a wide range of issues including incorrect permissions on the folder var/session. Source.
As I could still access the site via FTP, I manually deleted the cache and session files and pulled down the latest error files from var/log.
Error 28 from storage engine
In the exception.log I found the error;
Exception message: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1030 Got error 28 from storage engine
So the site had run out of hosting space, I don’t maintain or host the site, so this was difficult to detect at first.
Mysql error “28 from storage engine” – means that there is “not enough disk space“. Source.
The accumulation of numerous log files and large database tables can be culprits if not regularly truncated, however the removal of some very old archived backups was a quick fix to get them back into the site.
