hi all, I have been running a webserver of mine for about 2 weeks now and yesterday out of nowhere it started giving me this error when I try to log in with ssh. I did a little looking and found some things like password file corrupt and such but when I rebooted it worked fine. but now today it has done it again. I do not want to be rebooting my webserver as I do not have a monitor or keyboard hooked up to it.

when I reboot it this time what should I be looking for as a cause of this? I have tried logging in from different computers and using different names but it is all the same.

thankyou

I would start by checking the log files by doing something like this:

cat /var/log/messages | grep ssh

If you don't find anything there edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and change the log level to debug, restart sshd, try to login again, then check the log file again to see if you can find anything.

this seems to be whats going on:

Jul 30 13:58:07 ServerPenguin sshd(pam_unix)[15335]: authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=NODEVssh ruser= rhost=192.168.254.2 user=drew
Jul 30 13:58:27 ServerPenguin sshd(pam_unix)[15335]: account drew has expired (failed to change password)
Jul 30 13:58:27 ServerPenguin sshd[15335]: PAM rejected by account configuration[13]: User account has expired
Jul 30 13:58:27 ServerPenguin sshd[15335]: Failed password for drew from ::ffff:192.168.254.2 port 1142 ssh2
Jul 30 13:58:27 ServerPenguin sshd[15335]: fatal: monitor_read: unsupported request: 24


but i never changed anything and it worked for two or 3 weeks before starting this?

Try changing the passwd for drew. As root do:

passwd drew

OK, I went ahead and changed the password and time will tell I guess. Thanks for the help.