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Re: no shell, unable to cd to /home/*



on Sun, Oct 07, 2001 at 10:56:51AM +0200, Andreas von Heydwolff (avh@chello.at) wrote:
> Hello -
> I upgraded potato to Debian testing (2.4.9, XFree 4.1.0-6, old /dev 
> structure) a few days ago, everything worked fine. Now I can no longer log in 
> as a user but only as root. 
> 
> Login from the console gives me "Unable to cd to /home/avh", (avh is my user 
> id) - it's the same with another user account. Therefore X aborts when I 
> enter a user login in kdm.
> 
> su <user> from a console as root gives me a message "No shell".

What's in /etc/passwd for the user?

> The root account works flawlessly. Home directories are there, can be 
> browsed, permissions are set correctly.

Run and post output:

    $ mount
    $ ls -ld /home
    $ ls -las /home

> I deleted users and recreated them, to no avail. Deleted passwords,
> recreated them - likewise. Reinstalled packages login, file-utils,
> shell-utils, the X combo, nothing.

How are you creating and deleting users?  The 'adduser' command is
recommended.

> Two further details are puzzeling me: earlier today I accidentally
> renamed /etc/X11 to /etc/sane then using a Norton Commander like file
> manager because I entered "sane" into a box called up with F2 (rename)
> instead of F3 (search). 

'mc', perhaps?

Did you change any other files?

> But I realized this later when I could not start X andy more, changed
> the name back and X worked again. I guess this is not related. - Or
> have I been cracked through my wonderful cable modem despite running
> an ipchains firewall? When I recreated another user to my surprise
> when I checked the new home directories' permissions I saw that
> "telnetd" was the owner, "users" the group. But maybe I just was a bit
> quick with a graphical pulldown menu in the user damin program.

Not familiar with damin.

Peace.

-- 
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