Extremely odd login behavior, please help

krunk · Guru Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Posts: 316

Here's the short of it:

Fresh boot, logins and ssh work fine for root or regular users. After an undertimined amount of time the login system goes haywire. Specifically, if an already logged in user attempts to log out it hangs. If any user....root, regular, remote, etc. attempts to login he is prompted for the pass, but the authentication times out after 60s. A reboot is required to restore sanity.

In addition, when this occurs programs like userdel, useradd, etc do not work either.

To top it off, I do not see any odd logs which may be related to the errors. I thought it might be a pam issue and reinstalled along with the shadow package......

I rebooted and am now running the server to see if it occurs again, but if anyone could give me direction as to how to even go about attempting to trouble shoot this, I'd be appreciative.
_________________
G4 1ghz iBook
PowerMac G3 (B&W) [Powered by Gentoo and Gentoo alone

]

Dual G5
iPod 3rd generation

mr-simon · Posted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 10:04 am Post subject:

Hmm... Some ideas:

Can you `cat /etc/passwd` (or /etc/shadow, as root) when this happens? If not, what happens instead? Maybe that'll give you a clue.

Have you tried remerging your login tools (probably `emerge pam pam-login shadow` but check first)? If you're using silly cflags, try toning them down before you do that, too.

Also, check you can run a shell when this is going on... Try running 'bash' from the commandline... It may be that the system is having trouble starting a shell rather than logging in. Try creating a user with a different shell and see if they can log in when others can't.
_________________
"Pokey, are you drunk on love?"
"Yes. Also whiskey. But mostly love... and whiskey."

krunk · Guru Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Posts: 316

I re-emerged pam pam-login and shadow. As I said it's rather sporatic so I just waited. After a while, it happened again. I was able to cat /etc/shadow and it was readable and looked normal.

Complile flags are fairly pro quo, they are the suggested flags in the make.conf:

krunk · Guru Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Posts: 316

Any feed back would be nice, even shots in the dark because I'm at a total loss.

For example, at login....what are all the applications that are possibly accessed that I could reemerge in an attempt to fix things.
_________________
G4 1ghz iBook
PowerMac G3 (B&W) [Powered by Gentoo and Gentoo alone

]

Dual G5
iPod 3rd generation

mr-simon · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 2:14 pm Post subject:

Well, an `emerge -e system` is going to re-emerge everything required to handle logins, so that might help. Pay attention to what etc-update wants to do after this, though.

I also had a similar problem where my box wasn't accepting incoming connections because /dev/pts was not mounted. Maybe this could have become unmounted somehow? or /dev?? Sounds unlikely, but check /etc/mtab anyway.

My guess is that you're running pam-login unless you know any different.

Check the output of dmesg, plus /var/log/everything/current (if you're running metalog... otherwise /var/log/messages) for anything that looks like it might be an error, warning, or somesuch.

Aside from that... I don't really know what else to suggest.
_________________
"Pokey, are you drunk on love?"
"Yes. Also whiskey. But mostly love... and whiskey."

krunk · Guru Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Posts: 316

It was a metalog bug, I fixed by installing syslog-ng. Very hard to troubleshoot since all logging stops right before it happens.

Bug filed.

thanks
_________________
G4 1ghz iBook
PowerMac G3 (B&W) [Powered by Gentoo and Gentoo alone

]

Dual G5
iPod 3rd generation

MrPyro · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 3:29 pm Post subject:

Was just about to ask if you were using metalog: I had this problem over a year ago when I was using it.
_________________
Back off man, I'm a computer scientist

krunk · Guru Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Posts: 316

Yes. It's a shame. Metalog has very nice syntax and default logging.
_________________
G4 1ghz iBook
PowerMac G3 (B&W) [Powered by Gentoo and Gentoo alone

]

Dual G5
iPod 3rd generation

sdaffis · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 6:15 pm Post subject:

I was just about to ask you if you have SCSI adapters in your computer. I experienced the exact same thing on a Powermac 8600 a year or two ago and had some weird cabling.

_________________
Believe the lie

seaq · n00b Joined: 15 Jun 2003 Posts: 20 Location: Colombia

Hi, i'm having the same issue but i'm not using metalog, i'm using syslog-ng...

i'm gonna emerge system again hoping that it helps...