No one can not login to the machine even root

[Anh-Thu Tran]

Recently, our redhat es 3 update 6 has the problem that nobody can not login. We tried either local or NIS id, but failed. We also can not login to console by root. However, if you are currently in the box, you can continue your work without problem. We can not find anything wrong (dmesg, CPU, memory,...) and we ended up to reboot the box. After that, everything is fine: everyone can login: local and NIS; root can login from the console, ... The problem has been happened recenlty and nothing changed on the box. Any ideas? Thanks.

[Ivan Ferreira]

It's hard to say without any indications in /var/log/messages or /var/log/secure. What was the error? system hangs after password prompt or login incorrect?

[Alpha977]

Hello,

seems like me, when i try to connect but the table of connection was full.

You must to incerase this value, into the /proc folder. (but now i don't remember the parameter)
In my case was a kernel 2.4 bug. (Red Hat 8)

Bye

[Anh-Thu Tran]

The system doesn't hang since you still can do whatever if you are in it. For the new login user, it just hang after accepting the passwd. We thought that maybe NIS problem, but I got the same thing for local id. I found those in the /var/log/messages before I had to reboot the box to let users login:
Nov 19 04:02:01 addel01 syslogd 1.4.1: restart.
Nov 19 04:22:12 addel01 audbin[24673]: saving binary audit log /var/log/audit.d/bin.2
Nov 19 04:22:12 addel01 audbin[24673]: threshold 20.00 exceeded for filesystem /var/log/audit.d/. - free blocks down to 19.38%
Nov 19 04:22:12 addel01 auditd[3763]: Notify command /usr/sbin/audbin -S /var/log/audit.d/save.%u -C -T 20% exited with status 1
Nov 19 04:22:12 addel01 auditd[3763]: output error
Nov 19 04:22:12 addel01 auditd[3763]: output error
Nov 19 04:22:12 addel01 auditd[3763]: output error; suspending execution
Nov 19 11:32:12 addel01 pam_rhosts_auth[27277]: denied to root@dde01 as root: access not allowed
Nov 19 11:47:46 addel01 pam_rhosts_auth[27372]: denied to root@dde01 as root: access not allowed
Nov 20 08:23:42 addel01 pam_rhosts_auth[2398]: allowed to tranat@dde01 as tranat
Nov 20 08:35:51 addel01 gdm[4190]: gdm_child_action: Master rebooting...
Nov 20 08:35:51 addel01 shutdown: shutting down for system reboot

[Ivan Ferreira · Accepted solution]

This could be the audit daemon problem, see:

http://info.ccone.at/INFO/Mail-Archives/redhat/Dec-2005/msg00404.html

[Anh-Thu Tran]

Thank you. I disable my audit process and hope that will fix the problem.

[Steve_160]

Just a shot in the dark, try entering "uptime." Does the system load go way up when this is happening?

One possible cause is something in a profile script looping. For instance, on some older versions of RedHat, any command in ~/.bashrc would call ~/.bashrc again.