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Imagefallingwater wrote in Imagelinux

Can't login as a unprivileged user

Not sure if this is the correct place to post this, but we'll try anyway.
I was handed a RH box today which after an ungraceful shutdown is acting a bit flaky. Basically users can't login to it across the network nor can you su from root to a user, but you can login as root across the network and from the system console.

/etc/passwd appears to be fine and has the correct permissions, so does /etc/shadow and we're not using anything like NIS/NIS+/LDAP so I don't have to worry about a name service. All users have been added using the useradd command so I don't have to worry about some vi cowboy screwing up a : here or a ; there. All home directories are created as expected and are owned by their respective users.

All that shows up in /var/log/messages when connecting to the box via ssh is pam authenticating, opening and closing the connection in the same second, su throws up a very helpful could not open session and exits.

The system doesn't have a connection to the internet so I don't believe it's been rooted, and I have tried switching shells from /bin/bash to /bin/sh but nothing changes.

Any suggestions appreciated, as after running an strace and watching it die somewhere in the pam.deny stage I'm dry. I've looked at the contents of /etc/pam.d and everything looks the same as a system which is working fine.

Any suggestions appreciated.
(Maybe I'm looking at this too hard/ not hard enough?)