Solved: No permission to access pad

[oliver-s-k]

Hello,

this issue is no longer a problem for me, but maybe the solution might help someone who encounters a similar problem. None of the solutions I found regarding this error message were helpful, so I traced the error through the code. It turns out that Etherpad couldn't read the session cookie because it was undefined. The cookies appeared to be the same on both Moodle and Etherpad when inspected in the developer tools. Even moving Etherpad to the Moodle server so it has the same domain or performing a fresh install were a viable solution.

What didn't stand out to me initially, but is quite obvious once you know it, is that the cookies were set as HttpOnly, preventing Node.js from accessing them. During the Moodle upgrade, I also wanted to increase security, so I set HttpOnly on Apache.

A better solution is to keep these settings away from the webserver and instead use the settings provided by Moodle. This way, all cookies from Moodle will have the HttpOnly flag, but the ones set by mod_etherpadlite will not have that flag and can be read by Node.js.

Adios
Oliver