My system quit registering data about 22 hours ago. How can I get it back on-line
Welcome! Can you access its web interface at all? If so, have you tried looking in Setup: Admin for failed services to restart, or for rebooting the whole thing? If not, can you check its network connection somehow (remote access to router or gateway, or ping it from another device on its network) or its power supply? What have you tried?
The issue starts with I am not the original administrator. So I don’t get the admin prompt.
The guy who set it up can’t remember. About 7 years ago
So you can access the web interface, yes?
Are you an administrator at all? The Admin menu item only appears for me after I visit Setup: My Account. I’m not sure if that is normal or if I broke something again.
Do you have ssh access? If connection is refused, ssh can be enabled from the device a few pages before the shutdown prompt described below but that only helps if you know that password.
If you don’t have either access, then I guess a reboot is the only move. Is it an emonPi? Does someone have physical access to keep tapping the button until it displays “Shutdown? Y press & hold” then press and hold the button until it says “Shutting down” and after a minute, disconnect the power and reconnect it.
Take a look here. Whether this remains true/correct for the present version, I have no idea.
@Robert.Wall That’s helpful. It might be good to edit that to say “plain Latin letters/numbers” because I’m not sure younger people are told about ASCII much any more (but I could be wrong) and of course ASCII control characters should not be used.
I don’t actually know what the permissible character set is. As you may have noticed, precise, complete and unambiguous documentation isn’t always a strong point here.
I expect that in theory any character should be fine because everything will be told to use the same encoding, probably UTF-8.
In practice, anything not in the ISO basic Latin alphabet plus 0-9 (including accented, Greek, Cyrillic,…) can cause problems if any browser or other software decides it knows best and sends some other encoding. Even an apostrophe can end up curled and not match the straight basic one. 
So your advice to keep at least one admin login to the simplest alphanumerics is wise for that reason, even if emoncms does everything right and was documented as doing so.
That should be true, but I don’t think it is. There have been problems in the past with characters outside the range 0x20 – 0x7E, whether that has been solved satisfactorily, I don’t know.
Also, what is true for a local emonCMS might not be true for emoncms.org
By default, a local emonCMS has only one user, who has Admin privileges. Additional users can be enabled.
And, in the case where there is more than one registered user,
the Admin is the user who registered first.