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A Mystery: Can't login as normal user [SOLVED]
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monkeyBox
Tux's lil' helper
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Joined: 14 Feb 2003
Posts: 111
Location: Dallas, TX

PostPosted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 3:53 am    Post subject: A Mystery: Can't login as normal user [SOLVED] Reply with quote

Ok, here's the deal. I'm working on my laptop (It's about 3.5 yrs old), and all of the sudden I can't write to my home dir. I Log out of X and I have a login prompt on the cmd line. When I log in as myself (bdavis) I get the error:
Code:
No directory: /home/bdavis
So, I login as root. That works fine. I tried this:
Code:
su - bdavis
and get:
Code:
Unable to cd to "/home/bdavis"
Then I try
Code:
su bdavis
and get
Code:
Cannot execute /bin/bash: permission denied


So what the heck? I checked permissions on everything and nothing has changed. My home dir exists and has the correct permissions. I even changed my home dir and /bin/bash to 777 permissions. I even tried creating a new user from scratch and got the same results. Here's the real kicker. This same thing happened a month ago, and I ended up re-installing gentoo. Why would it happen again just out of the blue like that?


Last edited by monkeyBox on Mon Mar 13, 2006 4:59 am; edited 1 time in total
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NeddySeagoon
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Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54578
Location: 56N 3W

PostPosted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 11:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

monkeyBox,

Have you got a pam upgrade and not done etc-update ?
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
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monkeyBox
Tux's lil' helper
Tux's lil' helper


Joined: 14 Feb 2003
Posts: 111
Location: Dallas, TX

PostPosted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 5:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, I already tried re-emerging PAM. (and running etc-update) That didn't help.
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NeddySeagoon
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Joined: 05 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 6:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

monkeyBox,

Is /bin/bash listed as a permissible login shell in /etc/shells ?
Has /etc/shells got wiped even ?

Mine says
Code:
# /etc/shells: valid login shells
/bin/sh
/bin/bash
/bin/tcsh
/bin/csh
/bin/esh
/bin/ksh
/bin/zsh
/bin/sash

_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
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monkeyBox
Tux's lil' helper
Tux's lil' helper


Joined: 14 Feb 2003
Posts: 111
Location: Dallas, TX

PostPosted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 9:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

nope, /etc/shells is still there, and has /bin/bash in it. (looks exactly like what you posted above).
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monkeyBox
Tux's lil' helper
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Joined: 14 Feb 2003
Posts: 111
Location: Dallas, TX

PostPosted: Mon Mar 13, 2006 4:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I figured it out! That is, with a little help from my friend (GIYF). My problem wasn't the same problem as that guy's, although one of the things he said was to check that the user had read and execute permissions on / (root). I did a quick
Code:
chmod a+rx /
and voila! I can login as my normal user again! I have NO idea how permissions on / got changed, but oh well. At least I know how to fix it next time it happens :-)

I did, however, encounter another problem, which I was quickly able to fix. When I started X, I got an error that said (in my .xsession-errors file):
Code:
mkdtemp: private socket dir:Permission denied
I found out that I also didn't have write permissions on /tmp either. How the heck that happened, I don't know either. But as soon as I fixed the permissions (and cleared out /tmp and rebooted for good luck), I was smooth sailing once again.
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KB7OEB
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Joined: 28 Dec 2003
Posts: 58
Location: Phoenix,Arizona

PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2006 4:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I just had this happen to me, I could not figure it out because I could log in as root and myself but no other users can. I didn't know you could set permissions on /, how do you list /? ls / just shows whats in /
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hjnenc
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Joined: 15 Aug 2004
Posts: 1599
Location: Vienna, Austria

PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2006 7:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

KB7OEB wrote:
I just had this happen to me, I could not figure it out because I could log in as root and myself but no other users can. I didn't know you could set permissions on /, how do you list /? ls / just shows whats in /

Code:
ls -ld /
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KB7OEB
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Location: Phoenix,Arizona

PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2006 2:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks!
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