Urgent! Need help with recovering Gatekeeper functionality

[Alen]

Hi, all!
Happy new year!

It's about 2 years I was not on the forum, hope all of you are doing well. :-)


I have a very serious issue: after coming back from the dinner, I found the Gatekeeper window (opened on the Wingate machine) was closed, but the process is still running (happens quite often with Wingate 6, which we still use). I killed the process using task manager.
After that I am not able to logon to Gatekeeper.

I tried password recovery procedure: deleted the data for the Password value in the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Qbik Software\WinGate\UserDatabase\administrator), honestly I even deleted the whole "Administrator" key, while Wingate service stopped, and after start I still get
"Connection with Wingate server terminated" when trying empty pass and "... Bad password ..." when trying an old password.

I did not touch bindings or policy for Remote Control Service (I also compared registry values for bindings for loopback for RC and WWW proxy, they are the same, and the proxy is working normally).


Please help me ASAP!

[Alen]

More info:
1. checked if Remote Control service is listening, here what netstat showed:
TCP 127.0.0.1:808 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING

2. I had an old registry backup with the same admin password, tried to copy the old hash value to the registry, the result is the same.

3. Also compared registry values for RC service and Administrator account, except "Password", "POP3password" and "UserMustChangePassword" all values are the same. I copied these 3 values from the old registry, stop-start engine - no success.

Interesting is when I try an empty pass it gives me "Connection with Wingate server terminated", but with anything else: "There was a problem connecting to the server. Bad password - recheck your pasword..."!?

[Alen]

I found it!
Already loosed any hopes. Just found that "IncludeDefaultRights" has a value of 1!
I did not touch it, I am not guilty (honestly I don't remember I touched it). ;-)

Ok, now it is working finally.


P.S. I have created a short list of possible ways to lock myself, here it is formed as a author's text ;-):

Here are some more possibilities to lock ourselves (except admin password issues), we can (occasionally):
- stop Remote Control Service - restart Wingate, it should help (otherwise, find and correct the respective value for RCS start type, if one exist, and restart machine or Wingate service),
- remove rights for users (e.g. Administrator) to use Remote Control Service - use registry to restore the right,
- change port number for RCS - use netstat to find the port number RCS is listening to (or use registry to correct it),
- unbind network interfaces, on which RCS should listen to connections (AFAIK, binding for Loopback will be autorestored, so connect localy and restore bindings for remote connections),
- set Default Rights to "Must also be granted" - use registry to correct it,
- etc...

Besides, turned on Windows or endpoint protection system firewall also could block connections.

And make Wingate config backups, they are very useful! ;-)

Adrien, Logan and others: have a good and happy new year!


I hope I'll be back with my questions for Wingate 8 sometime...
Take care and good luck!

[adrien]

Hi Alen

welcome back!

glad you got your issue resolved

Regards

Adrien