Problems with local login

Peter Barker pbarker at barker.dropbear.id.au
Tue Jan 29 10:08:55 EST 2002


On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Boryan Yotov wrote:

>     I have two problems with a Suse Linux 7.1. A friend of mine
> recently asked me about he is not able to login into his box localy.
> Even if he tried with root or his own user's account he is able only
> to reach the "Welcome ..." message but not the BASH shell prompt. When
> the root password is changed via entering single mode after rebooting
> the same

Hmmm... you've described the nature of the problem, but not the
details. What happens after you enter the password? Does it just say
"Welcome to ..." and then send you back to the login prompt?

>     Even worse - I could access his box via SSH with the same root or
> user account, but some of the binaries into the /bin folder couldn't
> be executed (like ps and ls) hopefully the bash and sh could be ran.

If you were typing commands, chances are /bin/bash was working :-)

> The error message is (for example "bash: /bin/ls: File name or command
> not found") is displayed. I think the reason for this occurence could
> be that he simply doesn't have rigths for executing. But that's
> strange - each user if not explicitly discarded could execute binaries
> from /bin.

It is doubtful that this is a permission problem.

I would hazard a guess that he has a library problem. "File name or
command not found" will pop up if a library which a binary depends upon
does not exist on the system, or is broken in some way.

To help debug this, some output from some commands would be useful:
----
ldd /bin/bash # we know this one runs, so its libraries (if any) must
exist
ldd /bin/ls # we know this one doesn't, so what does it use which bash
doesn't?

strace -s8000 -f /bin/ls # do what is that command trying to do?
----

The following is output from the first two commands on my box:
---
[pbarker at bluebottle pbarker]$ ldd /bin/bash
	libtermcap.so.2 => /lib/libtermcap.so.2 (0x40026000)
	libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x4002a000)
	libc.so.6 => /lib/i686/libc.so.6 (0x4002e000)
	/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
[pbarker at bluebottle pbarker]$ ldd /bin/ls
	libtermcap.so.2 => /lib/libtermcap.so.2 (0x40026000)
	libc.so.6 => /lib/i686/libc.so.6 (0x4002a000)
	/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
[pbarker at bluebottle pbarker]$ strace -s 8000 -f /bin/ls
---

> Boryan Yotov

Yours,
-- 
Peter Barker                          |   N    _--_|\ /---- Barham, Vic 
Programmer,Sysadmin,Geek              | W + E /     /\                
pbarker at barker.dropbear.id.au         |   S   \_,--?_*<-- Canberra      
You need a bigger hammer.             |             v    [35S, 149E]   
qq%I've never heard of it or used it, apart from finding it in the Camel
 book and saying "Oh god".% -- Onceler






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