Re: Cannot execute /bin/bash: Permission denied

[Michael Spang <mike@midgard.no-ip.org>]

David Jarvie wrote:

>My system (debian testing) has suddenly stopped letting ordinary users log 
>on. Root can still function normally, but any other user receives the above 
>message whenever they try to log on. I have done some investigation into 
>the problem, and can rule out the following causes: 
> 
>bash corruption: I have reinstalled bash, libc6 and libncurses5. Plus, the 
>same problem occurs with /bin/csh. 
> 
>/etc/passwd and /etc/group look fine. 
> 
>Permissions on root directories: all have as a minimum, 755. /tmp/ 
>and /var/tmp have 777. 
> 
>Permissions on /home directories: all are owned by the respective user, and 
>have 755 permissions. 
> 
>Disk space: plenty of space on all volumes. 
> 
>Permissions on libraries used by /bin/bash: I did a 'ldd /bin/bash': 
>        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xffffe000) 
>        libncurses.so.5 => /lib/libncurses.so.5 (0xb7f43000) 
>        libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libdl.so.2 (0xb7f3f000) 
>        libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7e09000) 
>        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7f9c000) 
>lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 14 Feb 18 10:35 /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libdl.so.2 -> 
>libdl-2.3.5.so 
>-rw-r--r--  1 root root 9592 Feb  6 23:39 /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libdl-2.3.5.so 
>lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 17 Mar 19 17:46 /lib/libncurses.so.5 -> 
>libncurses.so.5.5 
>-rw-r--r--  1 root root 268396 Oct 14 22:21 /lib/libncurses.so.5.5 
>lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 13 Feb 18 10:35 /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 -> 
>libc-2.3.5.so 
>-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 1262704 Feb  6 
>23:39 /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.3.5.so 
>lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 11 Mar 19 17:44 /lib/ld-linux.so.2 -> ld-2.3.5.so 
>-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 88168 Feb  6 23:38 /lib/ld-2.3.5.so 
> 
> 
>Other libraries in /lib: not sure what their permissions should be. 
> 
>The output of 'strace su david -c /bin/bash' is attached. Perhaps somebody 
>who understands it can comment. 
> 
>Any ideas for fixing this would be extremely welcome. 
> 
>  
>
What are the permissions on /dev/log and /etc/localtime? These are the
two files that the strace reveals bash as being denied access to. Here
are those files on my system:

$ ls -lLh /etc/localtime /dev/log
srw-rw-rw- 1 root root    0 2006-03-16 23:01 /dev/log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.3K 2006-03-01 21:16 /etc/localtime

Michael Spang