Arch Linux

paulbarbee

Member

Registered: 2010-08-20

Posts: 49

Cannot login [Solved]

I cannot login to my laptop. This actually happened before and I re-installed Arch.

I cannot login as either the normal user or root, even in a terminal. I get a "login incorrect" error after inputting my password as either a regular user or root. The last time this happened I assumed it was a permission issue on /etc/passwd and booted from a live USB then reset the permissions, but still could not login so I reinstalled Arch. That was only a month or so ago, so this is almost a new installation.

The last thing I recall doing on this machine was backing it up to an external HD with Luckybackup, then shutting it down from LXDM. Today I booted it and could not login, booted to Windows 10, noticed the external HD was still attached, unplugged the HD, rebooted to Arch and still can't login.

Please help me.
Thank you!

Last edited by paulbarbee (2016-08-26 23:49:38)

jasonwryan

Anarchist

From: .nz

Registered: 2009-05-09

Posts: 30,424

Website

Re: Cannot login [Solved]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Re … t_password

The read your journal from the previous boot and see what happened.

Not a Sysadmin issue, moving to NC...

---

Arch + dwm   •   Mercurial repos  •   Surfraw

Registered Linux User #482438

paulbarbee

Member

Registered: 2010-08-20

Posts: 49

Re: Cannot login [Solved]

Thank you for your help, jasonwryan!

I booted to a Live UBS, chrooting into Arch and changing the root password but couldn't login. Then I looked at the journal with journalctl. It had 2 errors and a warning.

pam_securetty(login:auth): /etc/securetty is either world writable or not a normal file
ago 26 17:57:28 paul-linux login[606]: pam_shells(login:auth): /etc/shells is either world writable or not a normal file
ago 26 17:57:38 paul-linux login[606]: FAILED LOGIN 1 FROM tty3 FOR root, Authentication failure

Searching Google for the 1st error brought up an old Gentoo post showing the permissions should be 600. Somehow the got changed to 777. :-0 I changed the permissions and logged in. I have no idea how those permissions got changed to 777.

Daerandin

Member

From: Norway

Registered: 2013-05-07

Posts: 259

Website

Re: Cannot login [Solved]

If you are interested in figuring out why this happened, then you could try searching through your shell history for both your user and root and see if there are any recursive chmod commands that have been run recently.

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 17,378

Re: Cannot login [Solved]

$ ls -la /etc/shells /etc/securetty 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 86 Sep 30  2015 /etc/securetty
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 52 Sep 30  2015 /etc/shells

$ pacman -Qo /etc/shells /etc/securetty 
/etc/shells is owned by filesystem 2015.09-1
/etc/securetty is owned by filesystem 2015.09-1

pacman -Qkk filesystem does not list any entries for those files so 644 to me appears to be the default.

Daerandin

Member

From: Norway

Registered: 2013-05-07

Posts: 259

Website

Re: Cannot login [Solved]

644 is indeed the default according to the PKGBUILD for the filesystem package.

https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/pack … filesystem