Help! Can't login or su, but SSH is ok...
Hi all,
Over the weekend one of my sarge boxes decided to stop accepting logins.
Currently, the box allows remote SSH (via public-key authentication)
for regular users, but it doesn't allow user logins via telnet or on the
console, even for root. SSH'd-in users also can't su to any user.
The only way root can currently log in is to reboot in recovery mode.
Even in that mode, root can su to a regular user, but the regular user
can't su.
su reports:
su: Authentication information cannot be recovered
Sorry.
On Friday, I did change the box's configuration. I had previously been
trying to make it work with Samba Windows domain authentication, and had
added some pam_winbind.so lines to files in /etc/pam.d/. On Friday I
decided that I didn't really need Windows domain auth, so I removed all
references to pam_winbind.so from my /etc/pam.d/ files. There were no
problems after the changes on Friday, though I wasn't overly systematic
about trying things out, but I'm pretty sure I su'd to root...
I can't figure out what went wrong. My /etc/pam.d/ files look fine to
me (I can compare them to those on another, working sarge box on the
same network). I'm not even sure that's where the problem lies. Google
can't tell me what "Authentication information cannot be recovered"
means, and the machine isn't logging anything when su or logins fail.
I'd appreciate at least some pointers as to how to debug this problem,
cuz I'm stumped!
Marc
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