had same problem, assumed that it was due to creating the passwd file on initial launch. Removed it, and still cannot get past login screen.
tail -n5 /opt/splunk/var/log/splunk/web_service.log
2014-10-11 17:45:24,422 INFO [5439b30328d68350] root:138 - ENGINE: Bus STARTED
2014-10-11 17:45:27,862 INFO [5439b307da23649d0] root:138 - ENGINE: Started monitor thread 'Monitor'.
2014-10-11 17:45:27,973 INFO [5439b307f82364e10] decorators:332 - require_login - no splunkd sessionKey variable set; cherrypy_session=ae768a79dc5ec4304259c0818b6bfbffc6ddc667 request_path=/en-US/
2014-10-11 17:45:27,973 INFO [5439b307f82364e10] decorators:353 - require_login - redirecting to login
2014-10-11 17:45:36,766 ERROR [5439b310be236fd90] account:242 - user=admin action=login status=failure reason=user-initiated useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.124 Safari/537.36" clientip=xx.xx.xx.xx ERROR=Client is not authenticated
Please advise, ty.
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