UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi,

I have an issue that i have never come across before. I have 1 user on a server who cannot login. When they connect using Putty and put in the login id and password the session is terminated. It is as if they had /usr/bin/false in /etc/passwd but they dont. This is the password entry;

wrops3ixIRQI1gw4.:8101:154:Ops,,,:/home/wrops:/usr/bin/sh

Also, if i try to su to this user i get a reply

su: No shell
Memory fault

This is only happening with this one user and i wonder if anyone has come across this before and might have some ideas on where to look??

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No solution, alas, from my side, but a bunch of ideas:

Have you checked /usr/bin/sh to be what it should be: an executable containing a shell?

Maybe in your system there is a list of allowed login shells maintained. Is /usr/bin/sh among them? (I had this once when a user changed his login shell to bash on an AIX system and then couldn't log in.)

Are the rights for /usr/bin/sh (and its parent directories) set correctly so that the user can execute it?

Anyways, i hope you post the solution once you find it. This sounds interesting.

bakunin

Or maybe you are using NIS. Look at your /etc/nssswitch.conf.

Have you run the password file syntax checker "pwck" ?

In my browser display of you post the 6th character of the password line is a smiley face not a colon. I can't see a proper colon separator between field 1 (username) and field 2 (encrypted password). Maybe you have a bad character in the password file. If so, remember to use "vipw" not "vi".

I can confirm the passwd file is correct. This is how it should of been displayed previously.

wrops:p3ixIRQI1gw4.:8101:154:Ops,,,:/home/wrops:/usr/bin/sh

I have looked at /usr/bin/sh and it looks okay.

We do use NIS (of which i have no experience having only joined this company last week) so i dont know if that makes any difference. It just seems odd that it only effects this one user....

I will do some more looking around but if anyone has any other ideas on where to look please let me know.

Thankyou.

What OS? (AiX?)