Drupal 'Access Denied' on all pages

By Sean McKeon , Web Developer, on April 10, 2009

Ran into an interesting little snag this morning - a client's Drupal site was spitting out "Access Denied" errors for all page loads by anonymous users. It didn't appear to be a permissions problem - the nodes just wouldn't let anyone look at them.

A bit of Googling found a bunch of posts like this that say that, for some mysterious reason, Drupal can lose the contents of the node_access table and you need to repopulate them.

INSERT  INTO  node_access
  (nid ,gid ,realm ,grant_view, grant_update , grant_delete)
  VALUES ( '0',  '0',  'all',  '1',  '0',  '0')

Unfortunately, I didn't exactly have access to the client's database. A bit of poking around in the source showed me that visiting /admin/content/node-settings/rebuild would fire off an internal process to do the same thing.

Crisis averted, fix discovered. I just hope I don't need to use it again in the future.

Filed under 

JBB (not verified)

Thu, 06/04/2009 - 15:31

Thanks for this! After unsuccessfully trying multiple other fixes, this was the one that saved our site!

Much appreciated.

Anonymous (not verified)

Fri, 06/12/2009 - 08:20

Awesome! Thank you. Yet another entry into my massive little Drupal quirks file. I really start to wonder at times how much time I'm saving with Drupal when you take into account the hours scouring the interweb to try and find solutions to its... features. Yawn.

JJ (not verified)

Mon, 03/07/2011 - 05:45

Thank you for solution. Helped ALOT. Now I can soon go to sleep :]

guillaume (not verified)

Sun, 10/09/2011 - 17:02

Thank you so much, this solved my problem.
If you had a paypal donation button, I would have paid you a beer.
Thanks mate

Ben W (not verified)

Tue, 10/30/2012 - 19:23

I ran into this exact issue and got everything working again thanks to your assistance!

mattheoh (not verified)

Mon, 04/15/2013 - 15:39

Was searching for a day... I lost my contents after using cache....
Didn't see thois ioption in the back office.
your tips solved everything.
just a word, thanks a lot.

Tomas (not verified)

Thu, 07/17/2014 - 10:34

Like all before me, a GIANT THANK YOU, You saved my day from becoming shitty with this strange darn issue. I already saw the hours that I'm going to spend on this, but now I'm not, thanks to you! :)

Elegant and quick solution!

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