[SOLVED] Suddenly all non-root users cannot login.

yawpitch · 2018-04-04 10:42:50

In the middle of working on something yesterday accidentally hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE, forcing an immediate reboot. This would usually only be annoying, but once reloaded I can no longer login with any normal user account.

Thought at first it may be a keyboard issue or ~/.Xauthority or something with lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf, etc ... but I've run through all of those to no avail.

I am now certain it's not lightdm itself, as I also discovered that I cannot login via any of the other TTY terminals, with any attempt to do so showing this in journalctl:

Apr 04 11:13:10 MYHOSTNAME login[9070]: FAILED LOGIN 1 FROM tty3 FOR MYUSERNAME, Authentication failure

I am, however, able to login as root, and I can create and update user accounts that way. I created a new user account, but that too is unable to login.

So then I installed pamtester ... and when I run it on my user accounts, it authenticates properly.

So now I'm left with this:

1) my user account password is in fact correct (pamtester success)
2) it cannot be the keyboard + lightdm setup (given pamtester success and failure of tty login)
3) wtf?

The only remaining clue: while logged in as root I noticed that /home was owned by my user ... no idea how that happened; but changing it to root ownership doesn't fix the problem.

What I cannot find anywhere is the exact permissions and ownership that should be on /home itself.

Any ideas??

Last edited by yawpitch (2018-04-04 10:53:17)

yawpitch · 2018-04-04 10:53:00

Dammit. Figured it out. Somehow (probably as I was fooling around with Ansible) my shell got changed from /bin/bash to /usr/bin/bash in /etc/passwd.

Would still love to know what the proper ownership and permissions are for /home though.

Trilby · 2018-04-04 10:54:28

yawpitch wrote:

What I cannot find anywhere is the exact permissions and ownership that should be on /home itself.

0755 root:root

It sounds like you fixed the ownership of the /home directory appropriately, but I'd wonder how it was changed as whatever caused that likely changed other ownerships that are likely the (remaining) problem.

I'd start with this:

sudo find /etc -not -user root

Any results should be suspicious, any of the passwd/shadow family of files would be a definite red flag.

Then you could check `pacman -Qk` or even `pacman -Qkk` output.

The very best solution though would be to retrace your steps and figure out how the ownership of /home changed in the first place. As one obvious check, can you now log in as the user that had ownership of /home? (if there was a chown -R run, one user would own all user dirs which might prevent others from logging in, but that user might now be ok).

EDIT: nevermind most of this as it was cross posted with your follow-up.

Last edited by Trilby (2018-04-04 10:55:00)

yawpitch · 2018-04-04 11:00:02

Thank you for that. I'd already checked ownerships via find, nothing on the machine (except /home and /home/USER) were owned by my USER. So at least it's a fairly narrow screw up.

Not entirely sure how the /home permissions changed, but most likely it was an errant Ansible call. I somehow also seem to have set the default shell for new users to /usr/bin/bash as well, which explains why the new user accounts also couldn't login, even after the /home permissions were fixed.

Arch Linux

#1 2018-04-04 10:42:50

[SOLVED] Suddenly all non-root users cannot login.

#2 2018-04-04 10:53:00

Re: [SOLVED] Suddenly all non-root users cannot login.

#3 2018-04-04 10:54:28

Re: [SOLVED] Suddenly all non-root users cannot login.

#4 2018-04-04 11:00:02

Re: [SOLVED] Suddenly all non-root users cannot login.

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