I have had a minor pain today with login in to my server as a regular user. At first the PuTTY window closed as soon as I typed in my pw.

Figured that out after reading small hints here and there....: Change "UseLogin yes" (it was no) in "sshd_config"

Then when I did manage to get in I got this:

bash: /etc/profile: Permission denied

If I su <user> I also noticed that my user name (as the first part of the prompt) was: "I have no name"

Reading again.... The solution for me was to: chmod 755 /etc

So Im post this coz I see alot of pll have the same problem. And maybe this can help or give some pointers.

Edit: It should be 755 on /etc and not 744 as I posted at first.

I can add that in my auth.log I found this:

"fatal: login_get_lastlog: Cannot find account for uid"

Chmoding /etc to 744 will give it drwxr--r-- permissions, i.e. nobody but root will be able to cd into /etc. That's not good. The permissions need to be 0755 on /etc. Probably login cannot read the passwd file and this is causing all your problems.

Sounds to me that you didn't use the correct user name when logging in or using the su command. UID stands for User ID, which is an integer that the system associates with a user.

Im not asking here. Im stating my solution to a problem I had.
When I was searching to the solution I saw that I was not to only one with this problem, and since all the infor needed to fix it was allower the place I thought this might be a good thing to post here.

And your right, it should be 755 on /etc