I inadvertently did the following:

mv ../lib* .

from
/local

(which really means - all files inside /lib/ got moved to /local/)

.. and now I CANNOT get into the box. 'Access Denied' as a root or a regular user. However, I still have the currently running SSH session, which doesn't let me do much - except for cd, pwd, echo and couple other basic commands (no cp, mv, ls etc). Can't sudo either (not that it would help much). Please advise! I don't have physical access to this box; it's few hundred miles away. RHEL 5. Thanks!!!

One of the libraries that you have renamed is the PAM library. Without the PAM library being available then nobody will be able to pass through security, remote, local, or otherwise.

If the point of this question is to find out how to login remotely without knowing the password then you are out of luck.

--------------------
Steve Stites

What do you mean by saying 'without knowing the password'? If PAM is a library that's been renamed (moved), where and how do I put in the password? The machine responds to ping, accepts SSH connections, asks for login and password, and goes 'Access Denied' -- even to root!

If you still have that valid SSH connection that enabled you to move everything from the /lib/ directory to /local/ then do the reverse by COPYING everything from /local/ to /lib/ - you will have a lot of duplicate files, but at least both /lib and /local will serve their purpose properly. If your system becomes reliable again, then start sorting out what belongs where.

If your SSH connection breaks or is timed out, then you will have to travel a few hundred miles.

Linux Archive

Yes, but how do I copy? The CP command doesn't work!!

Can't you mount the partition from another machine? I imagine that there isn't much you can in this case except accessing the drive and doing repairs from some external location.

You can run mv, cp , etc as following:
/usr/lib/local/ld-linux.so.2 --library-path /usr/lib/local /bin/cp args

Valery

I'm just curious if it was possible (and how) to recover that system?

Linux Archive

Sure.
/usr/lib/local/ld-linux.so.2 --library-path /usr/lib/local /bin/cp args
can be used to copy missing libraries back. May be mv will be OK too

excellent...I didn't knew this.....it works

Sorry - I was away from my machine for few days. Yes it worked on my test machine (when I was logged in as root); but on the production box that I did mv earlier, I had sudo'ed to root and had done mv; so the command didn't work with my permissions when I tried to move the libraries back. I needed to either be logged on as root, or be able to sudo (where /usr/sbin/sudo wasn't recognized any longer due to missing libraries and dependencies).

Thank you for the help - regardless. You guys are great!