Hello,

whenever i log into my redhat command line i get
login as: john
john@192.168.1.60's password:
Last login: Wed Nov 22 15:28:45 2006 from 192.168.1.151
id: cannot find name for user ID 500
id: cannot find name for user ID 500

and the prompt will look like:
[I have no name!@localhost ~]$

have anybody seen that before

Thanks

Haha@ funny stuff. Login as user root. Then create a new user

I did that but it didn't work

what does this show?

haha, but you can login as root ok and get:

[root@localhost ~]$



So if you look in /etc/passwd for the John user, there is an entry something like this?

john:x:500:500:john,,,:/home/john:/bin/bash

?

grep -i john /etc/passwd | cut -d: -f3,5
500:

cat /etc/passwd | grep john
john:x:500:500::/home/john:/bin/bash

haha, it still doesn't work

Hmmmm. Is this a fresh install? Are you using PAM for authentication locally?

Doesn't your RHEL distro have a funky automatic user creation script like adduser or superadduser??

Use your root login to tail -f /var/log/auth.log or equivalent log, then use another local terminal to try your john user and see what it says. Certainly it is quite strange.

do you have a dir in /home?

I'm thinking your home dir was deleted but you're known to /etc/passwd and shadow.

if you do have a home dir. check your ~/.bash_profile.

What does your .bash_profile look like?

Well guys, I hope i could answer you questions BUT its a little bit to late - we have totally lost the system basically its dead now with " kernel panic - not syncing" error on the screen.

we found the following thread online and we ran fsck as it says it worked but it just killed the system with the above error message:

PostPosted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 6:56 pm Post subject: Re: could not open session Reply with quote
I had the same problem so I ran 'su' with strace. My problem was permissions on the /etc/passwd file. I had some filesystem corruption after two years of uptime, so fsck must have recreated the file with bad perms...

Thank you for your help