Shell will not start for root and ppp broke
Hi,
Last night I had some bizzare things happen with my system. First, I
can't seem to use ppp anymore.
Last night I started ppp with sudo and everything began to work normally
with my modem dialing and begginning to negotiate a connection with my
isp. But, then I heard my modem click off and I switched over to the
terminal displaying my logs and noticed it said, "Connection script
failed." So, I just tried again but this time ppp would not even
start. So, I thought, "How weird," and decided I should just try it as
root. Oddly, my system would not start a shell for me as a root user.
It would login me into the system displaying when I had last logged in
and the current time and all that stuff but wouldn't start a shell.
'who' show root as logged in and when I look in 'ps aux' /bin/login is
running. Then I tried to su to root and that worked just fine,
though. But then when I tried to execute pon again it just hung
without returning a prompt or any response from my modem. And when I
tired it again as a user with sudo then it hung as well.
As for my problem with ppp I've never had any difficulties before and my
brother used it about three hours earlier and he said he had no
troubles. I thought maybe I could make some educated guesses to the
problems if I turned on the debug option when calling ppp. But, this
didn't help either in that it didn't write anything to my logs files-- I
think this is b/c syslogd is broke also (yup! unvbelieveable, eh?). I
checked my logs this morning and the last entry last night was twenty
minutes after I tried to to use ppp for the first time. I tired to
restart syslog with /etc/init.d/syslogd restart and it appears to
restart ('top' says it is running) but does not make any entries to show
so in any of my logs.
And this morning two other oddities have popped up. I thought I would
just go ahead and restart and see what that does (even though I really
didn't want to) but my system didn't reboot when I used Ctrl-Alt-Del.
It broadcasted the system is going down message but it looks like it
coudln't change runlevels. And... now when I exit out of the system
getty does not return a login prompt anymore.
I find all of this very, very weird and I have no clue what to make of
all of it. I've reveived my command history and I have not done
anything bizzare or out of the ordinary that would warrant something
like this happening. My computer has been running smoothly for the
past month with only one minor glitch during a session in X. I'm
running Slink with 2.2.10 on a PII 233 with a US Robotics Modem. I
would appreciate any suggestions on how to fix any of this problems and
get my system back to running normally.
Thank you,
Bill.
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