Re: etch: can no longer login

David E. Fox wrote:
On Sat, 29 Apr 2006 13:27:08 -0700
"David E. Fox" <dfox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

dfox@m206-157:~$ sudo unmount /dev/hdd
sudo: pam_authenticate: Module is unknown

This just happened very recently.

hate replying to myself, but need some help. due to some other
broken-ness, had to reboot. when I got to a console prompt I could not
login. Got halfway working with a chroot off of a knoppix disk, but
there are a couple of gotchas still [...]

I know next to nothing about PAM, but I imagine that you could configure PAM to let everyone login without passwords.

Then, with the firewall up and configured to disallow new connections to your machine, you could go online and update PAM and related modules to see if they've already fixed the problem.

BTW, if you want to boot without the knoppix disk, you could type "init=/bin/sh" at the boot prompt (I think).

You might have to purge and reinstall PAM because the libraries might have changed enough to require that the config files be changed too.

And you've probably already figured out that if you do remove PAM, you want to get it back quickly because /bin/login dynamically links against PAM. No PAM, no login. The same goes for ssh.

Good luck. I hope you get it fixed.


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