Unable to login even thru console

[Rick Copley]

We have upgraded the VAS and Secure Shell to latest version and rebooted. The server came up, but not allowing to login thru console.

Rebooted in single user mode, when checked using the passwd command, I get the following PAM authentication error.

bash-3.2# passwd
pam_chauthtok: Shared object load failure.

Looks like pam configuration issue.

[Steven Schweda]

> Unable to login [...]

To what, exactly?

> [...] single user mode [...]

> bash-3.2# [...]

If this really is an HP-UX system, then you
shouldn't be using "bash" as the shell for
user "root". If it's not an HP-UX system,
then you might try asking in some appropriate
forum.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Please look at the system and report the model number and other hardware information.

Also please try and tell us what OS you are working with.

Changing the root shell in HP-UX an an excellent way to put a system in just this condition.

SEP

[Tor-Arne Nostdal]

Assuming you're running HP-UX:

As mentioned already, you can get into trouble when switching shell for the root user.
If this is the case - change back to /sbin/sh as login shell for the root user.

The pam error message might indicate that you want to authenticate towards a directory for central handling of authorizations.
If this is the case, you would need to start several of the services in higher runlevel in order to get pam authentication working.

It also says "Shared object load failure."
When you are in single-user mode, you do not have all filesystems mounted. The files (objects) you need might be located on filesystems currently not available.