I just updated my Peplink Balance One from firmware 8.1 to 8.2.1 and noticed two rather odd login issues after the upgrade. In both cases, the admin login page claimed that the username or password was incorrect.
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Blocked due to rate-limit. I have my Peplink admin set to use HTTPS only. After upgrading, the Peplink uses a new SSL certificate. When I first tried to log in, I noticed a page-refresh loop (the admin page kept bouncing to an ‘invalid certificate’ page). This was using Safari on iOS 15 on an iPad. The end result was that the Peplink banned the IP address, so I was unable to log in from that device. However, rather than saying “you are banned for flooding” the login page just said that the username / password was wrong. This was confusing.
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Case-sensitive password? Since I couldn’t log in on my iPad, I moved over to another computer, and logged in fine. Then I tried to log in from my main laptop, and again got failures. Eventually I realized that these two computers did not have the same stored password - the password was identical except one was using uppercase and the other lowercase. E.g. “Password” vs. “password”. What is bizarre is that right before the upgrade to 8.2.1, both computers could log in fine, even though they were using different passwords.
My suspicion is that prior to 8.2, the admin password was not case-sensitive, which would be the only way to explain this situation.
In any case, once I figured these issues out (banned IP due to browser refresh loop, and case-sensitive passwords) I was able to get everything working…