login problems

[Duane Attaway]

> On Sun, 3 Nov 2002, Dale Herring wrote:
> 
> > Anyone had a problem where the system will boot up okay, but you are
> > unable to login? Basically system boots fine. No errors. in multiuser
> > mode or single user mode. Gets to a login prompt. When entering the
> > login the system will act like it is searching then go right back to a
> > login prompt. No password prompt or anything else.

I forgot to mention this same thing happened to me when I tried to boot up 
a recent version of redhat on a 486 laptop with something like 4MB RAM.  
It didn't have enough resources to complete the login.  Remember all the 
other default services and servers are started before the login terminals 
are started.  If it doesn't have enough memory to load the authentication 
modules, login cannot work.

And a few /etc files of interest should look like this:

dattaway at satellite dattaway $ ls -al /etc/passwd* 
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         1889 Oct 30 11:16 /etc/passwd
-rw-------    1 root     root         1886 Oct 30 11:16 /etc/passwd-

Let me know if you can't find the problem...