UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Ahhhh!!!!!!!!
All of my user accounts can no longer login. I suspected a corrupt passwd file, but everything looks OK and the passwd file works when I copy it to another system. All user accounts cannot login...they recieve a "No directory defined" error, but I can logon using root just fine. I have no idea what could have caused this, but I was hoping that maybe someone has seen this before and can help me recover. I'm running Solaris 8 on a Sun Netra T1. Also I have checked all the permissions on the users' home directories as well as the permissions on the passwd and shadow files and all is setup OK. Could be a PAM issue as well, but I would not know how to confim this. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.
Jeff Miller

Can you su to those users - is there home directory there and mounted (check for NFS problems if appropriate) ?

If mounting NFS directories - also check DNS or /etc/hosts for the server where the mounts come from. Make sure you can mount from there.

I ssh into the server and login as root. If I issue a login, and login as another user, my ssh session closes. There are no NFS mount points configured on this server.

Can you as root do a su - joeuser (please put in one of the userID instead of joeuser)?

There is NOTHING on SunSolve for this - normally if a directory is missing or mistyped in /etc/passwd you get dumped into / or /tmp as a home directory. I changed my /etc/passwd file to add a space in different places but could not create your error.

Ask yourself what changes occurred - who else may have changed something -

Do you use any products or scripts to administer user accounts - any changes to those (or bugs that would have to be found on 3rd party web sites).

Any backups happening while someone could have been changing their password - (I haven't seen that problem since 4.1.x but you never know)

Oh, I'm on my way out of here so hopefully someone else is watching for your answers and have more info. Good luck - I'll check back in later (possibly)

I am not sure about this ,
But I used Winscp once to check my ssh configuration . It couldnt find my home directory , even though i could telnet it properly .

Also another thing to note was . Using OPENSSH for Windows worked perfectly
Even Putty and pscp worked nice . I had no answer why it wasnt working for Winscp .
If u r doing an ssh from Windows , Just try a different software to connect ...

DP

I use the latest version of Putty and everything works fine. I can connect and logon as root just fine. I just cannot logon as any other user. This server is an FTP so none of the users can connect via FTP as well. They recieve "Logon Failed". When the system boots up, there is a message that the ytem could not read from the passwd file but the permissions on the passwd file are 444 and 400 for the shadow file. Luckily I am able to still logon as root and copy all of my files to another system. But I would still like to know if anyone has ever encountered a situation like this before. It baffles me how one minute everything works great and the next everything is broken. The last thing I did on the server before it went nuts was set some permissions on a user's home directory. I know I did a "chmod ~" on accident, but didn't think this was even a valid command so I didn't think nothing of it. Oh well, I may just have to bite the bullet on this one and re-install, but if anyone has any ideas....I would love to hear them.

I never saw a post back if you can login as root and su - to a user or not.

As far as seeing this exact problem - no.

When you did the chmod ~, were you root? If so, it may have changed ~ which is the home directory of the user logged in, in this case possibly, root. If root's home dir is /, then that may be the problem.

Check your permissions for your top level directories (especially /etc and /usr) - this may be where you have a problem.

If there is more to the error message then your original post, please post it. If you get a different error when attempting to su - to one of those users, post it.