Arch Linux

jeffmikels

Member

Registered: 2007-04-19

Posts: 36

[SOLVED] Unable to login from local tty / ssh login works

I run a home server using Arch and have been doing so for about 7 years now. However, I have recently been thinking about switching to Ubuntu because the rolling release model is giving me headaches maintaining server packages like mythtv. As a result, I don't update very often.

However, I recently ran a system update and as per usual, I have problems.

Specifically, this time, I can log in just fine through SSH. Commands like sudo, su, passwd, and other user commands work; however, I cannot log in at all from a physical terminal.

This is what I get in my logs:

Jun 20 19:29:39 adam login: FAILED LOGIN 1 FROM tty2 FOR jeff, Authentication failure
Jun 20 19:29:46 adam login: pam_unix(login:auth): authentication failure; logname=LOGIN uid=0 euid=0 tty=tty2 ruser= rhost=  user=jeff

Can anyone give me some advice?

Last edited by jeffmikels (2014-06-21 05:50:57)

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...using Arch as a home server since 2006.

twelveeighty

Member

From: Alberta, Canada

Registered: 2011-09-04

Posts: 1,139

Re: [SOLVED] Unable to login from local tty / ssh login works

First, check your system logs, there may be an indication of a failure that happened before you even get to log in. Also, check your pacman.log and make sure you've handled all pacnew changes. There's been a few /etc/passwd changes come through lately so maybe this is related.

jeffmikels

Member

Registered: 2007-04-19

Posts: 36

Re: [SOLVED] Unable to login from local tty / ssh login works

SOLUTION:

Because of the symlinking of /bin to /usr/bin, I had changed my shells in /etc/passwd to be /usr/bin/bash

Apparently, that doesn't work when logging in through a tty even though it works just fine under an ssh session.

I changed the shells back to /bin/bash (unintuitive!) and my users can now log in from the terminal.

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...using Arch as a home server since 2006.