Hi All,

I have a server running on FC4.
I did a yum -y install screen, it updated some dependencies and installed sucessfully. after which i rebooted the server and found that i am unable to login into the server via console or ssh.

I am able to see the login prompt for ssh, but all accounts are unable to login (root/normal users).
I tried to login via console also failed.

This server has webmin installed, and i found that i can login into webmin, i used webmin to change the root password and it say successful. however, i tried to login via SSH or console but still failed.

I can remember that glibc and some pam something was updated prior to installing screen.

What happened? What should i do to be able to login via SSH or console again?

Thanks in advance.

I suspect the pam update may have done something to your /etc/ssh/ssh_config file. Check there to make sure PasswordAuthentication is set to yes.

Does webmin allow you shell access. If an update effects a configuration, it may add .rpmnew to a new configuration or .old to an old one. For example, a good thing to check for would be for /etc/pam/login and /etc/pam/login.old. If you have both files, use diff to find the difference.

Also, be sure to look in the logs. An authentication failure will be logged, and may indicate exactly why.

I tried using the command shell in webmin, but for all the command i tried to execute, it gives me a su: incorrect password error

How about using sudo?

> sudo cd /etc/pam.d
su: incorrect password

I went into single mode and check the secure.log

It complain that PAM adding faulty module: /lib/security/pam_stack.so
PAM unable to dlopen(/lib/security/pam_stack.so)
PAM [error: /lib/security/pam_stack.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory]

It may be time to upgrade to a newer version of Fedora Core. pam_stack was depreciated 3 years ago.

Okay, i managed to sort out the PAM Problem.
What we did is as below and some steps as above reply(moving passwd and shadow file to the orginal place)
on the FC4 server, rpm -qa | grep pam
pam_smb-1.1.7-6
pam_krb5-2.1.15-2
pam-0.99.7.1-5.fc7
pam_passwdqc-0.7.6-1
pam_ccreds-1-6
Okay i remember that the dependency that got installed was pam-0.99.7.1-5.fc7.

Using another server that was on fc7, we compared the diff between authconfig, login and sshd with the one on fc4 server, found out that fc7 server also do not also have the pam_stack.so file as well but was working without any problem.

So we ftp in the authconfig, login and sshd file into the FC4.

Voila, able to login via sshd and console.

Thanks for the help given.
Phew...

Glad you got it working. I don't think FC4 is supported anymore. You may run into problems in the future as well. Upgrading may be something to start thinking about.