Hi, i have a RH 7.3 box, recently i found that users other than the root cannot login into their shell accounts ,
what could be wrong ,
when they try to login, a message prompts that the home directory could not be found , therefore it is logging in with home directory ="/" and then a prompt with bash$ comes and i cannot run any command on the home directories since it states that permission denied,

one thing that i noticed was that when the message comes stating that home directory could not be found, there is a '!' mark at the end of the home-directory name,
like /home/user! ,

help me out

First thing would be to have a look
at /etc/passwd

Cheers,
Tink

i looked at the /etc/passwd file, it made no sense to me
i'm a newbie

Go ahead and post it up if you'd like.

However, the line/entries you are probably going to want to look at will be the users entries, and the corresponding HOME that they have, such as /home/cyberswami for user cyberswami
And the shells, these should be:
/bin/bash
or other appropriate shells for your situation (most likely bash for now).

Cool

The /etc/passwd file shows no problem but i still get the following message :

Last login: Mon Jun 30 15:22:19 on tty4
No directory /home/cyberswami!
Logging in with home = "/".
bash: /home/student/.bash_profile: Permission denied
bash-2.05$

It would really help us if you posted up your /etc/passwd file. However, I understand if you are a little paranoid, and wish to not do this.

/home/cyberswami
And
/home/student
Are not the same unless they are symlinked to each other (not likely). So either there is an issue with your /etc/passwd syntax (likely) or your permissions are really out of whack.

I'd go about this like so:

Remove the corresponding line ONLY from /etc/passwd, then, follow it up with an adduser -g blah -s /bin/blah (blah is the only word that comes to mind ) and so on to create the new user, this may help with the syntax issue. Also, check permissions on /home/username (assuming that's what you set from your useradd/adduser script) to make sure that your user has ther permissions to access it.

To check permissions:
ls -l /home
And look for the directory that is assigned to the user as their home, likely the users name: /home/user

HTH

Cool

actually there's no problem with symlinks, i just got a bit paranoid,the home directory has got a 777 permission i just tried that out to check whether it will work or not
i still get the same problem

If the home directory has 777, then ANYONE on your system should be able to access it, yet you are getting errors of "Permission Denied" on it. I'm leaning towards a syntax error in /etc/passwd, or, hopefully not (since I don't understand it all that well) an error in PAM or Shadow... Try removing the user and recreating them with useradd and see if that fixes the problems.

Cool

Hi !
I have setup an NIS server and client. I have created user 'jane' at nis server.

At nis client, I login as jane and enter password. The following message appear.

node_B login:jane
password:
Last login:sat Nov 18 22:16:42 on tty1
No directory /home/jane!
Logging in with home="/"
bash-2.05 $


My /etc/passwd and /etc/group is as follow:

/etc/passwd
----------------
joe:x:501:502:joe tan:/home/joe:/bin/bash

/etc/group
-------------
student:x:501:jane, tom, joe

Appreciate if anyone can help. Why can I access the /home directory.

Regards,
x2000koh