OpenSuSE 10.3 won't login.

deemacsee · 08-28-2009, 03:26 PM

Hello,

I'm running Open SUSE 10.3 and recently I've found I can't login - after username and password entry the screen blacks out for a couple of seconds and returns to the login screen. I can still login as root. I haven't made any changes to the system lately; a couple of months ago my wifes' login failed in the same manner although mine worked as usual - we got round that with a reboot, but now neither of us can login and it seems to have happened spontaneously. I tried setting a user to automatically login, and that does work however. Booting to failsafe mode and attempting to login brings up a recurring "/dev/null/permission denied" message.

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

forrestt · 08-28-2009, 03:39 PM

Log in as root and run "ls -l /dev/null" if it isn't something like:

crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 2009-08-27 10:41 /dev/null

Then run:

Code:

# rm -rf /dev/null
# mknod /dev/null c 1 3
# chmod 666 /dev/null

HTH

Forrest

deemacsee · 08-28-2009, 05:56 PM

Okay, did that. It came back with

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 28 23:50 /dev/null

I'm afraid I'm a bit of a biff at the command line. Now what?

forrestt · 08-29-2009, 09:14 AM

You ran the other three commands and it still is rw-r--r--?

Forrest

deemacsee · 08-29-2009, 04:29 PM

I ran the first command, and that gave the response I posted. After running the three other commands and trying the first command again it came back with

crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1,

then the date. Login was then successful as a user, but only until shutting down. After starting up again the original problem had returned.