Automatic root login after boot

[Alastair Gregory <agregory@intelledge.com>]

I have an odd problem with my Debian system. When
it boots up into multi-user mode, it "automatically" logs in
as 'root' on the first console.  It's impossible to terminate
the session, as a new one starts immediately after I exit
the shell.  It's in run level 2 and the other consoles behave
normally.

Another problem I have is that the machine won't reboot
by itself.  If I "telinit 6", it shuts down, then sits there
without rebooting until I hit the reset button.  Is this an
AMD quirk?

I loaded Debian 1.3 on an old AMD 486-80 based
machine.  It seemed to load properly, except that a
number of utilities were not present (such as 'dselect',
"mesg", "start-stop-daemon").  I was a bit dubious, but
not having loaded Debian for a while (last time it was
at 1.0, I think) I just assumed I wasn't up with the
latest developments. I scrounged a dselect binary which
ran, but no access methods were available so I was
no better off.

The autologin phenomenon didn't manifest itself until I
tried reinstalling the base system from the boot diskettes.
On booting from the hard disk after this, it asked me to
pick a root password, but after the "passwd" dialog,
it'd say "Try again" and run "passwd" again.  I flipped to
another console, logged in as a mere user, su'ed and killed
the passwd and bash processes, and ran "passwd" manually
to set the root password. Now I have the autologin problem
but "dselect" seems to be OK.

My guess is that part(s) of the Debian load process didn't
complete, or failed silently. Can anyone shed light on this?
Could I somehow have bad install disks and not know it?

Thanks,
Alastair





--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-request@lists.debian.org . 
Trouble?  e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .