Ok, heres what happened....

I downloaded the kernel source for 2.6.8 and did a compile and moved my new image on over to /boot... i deleted the symlink in /usr/src for the old source tree for linux-2.4.whatever and made one for the 2.6 tree. Anyways when i copied my 2.6 image over to /boot i didnt realize my boot partition wasnt mounted so when i rebooted and selected my new kernel from LILO is obviously didnt work. Next i restarted and selected my old kernel, which gave me a nice panic message on boot. Realizing i removed that symlink i booted to an install disc and chrooted into my system and replaced the symlink to the 2.4 source tree. I rebooted once more and It worked.. yay... heres where the problem cropped up i get the lovely:

Welcome to Linux 2.4.26 (tty1)

lucca login:

prompt... i type root, or any of my other user names and hit enter... it pauses for a second then it goes back to the login prompt and banner w/o asking for a password. Strange thing is when i SSH in from another machine i can log into any user fine, and all of my other services (mysql, apache) still work fine. Im fairly well versed with how to fix stupid problems and how to try to figure out what is happening thru log files, but I am totally stumped and google has provided no insight cuz im not sure what exactly to search for.

Any help would be appreciated

thanks in advance!

I don't think /usr/scr/ has that much to do with booting linux (the kernel image is copied to /boot/ and the modules are placed in /lib/modules/). Maybe you've got a totally different problem here?
Are you sure you are booting your old kernel? have you tried to use ssh to log in and reset the root password?

Before you reset any passwords, I would suggest logging in with SSH, go into /var/log and doing:

Then try to login the machine itself from the login prompt and watch what messages come up in those logs.

I did a tail on that log before .... all i get is this:


lucca sshd[726]: Accepted password for root on ..... port 4807 ssh2
lucca -- MARK --
lucca -- MARK --
lucca -- MARK --
lucca -- MARK --
lucca -- MARK --
lucca -- MARK --


and before the ssh login is the system starting usb, dhcp, agpgart that sort of thing from a normal boot up.


and after another reboot and checking i get the exact same thing minus the --MARK-- and also the # of those mark lines did not increase the more times i tried to log in.

and before i copied the new 2.6 kernel image into /boot but it was on /dev/hda2 which is mounted at /
but /dev/hda1 is mounted at /boot only when i need to make changes.. so the 2.6 kernel was on the wrong drive... i moved it to the proper one but havent tried booting it.


But in my original posts that the only changes i made from my last console log in as root or anyone else for that matter.

oh and I am sure i am booting the old 2.4 kernel it says its 2.4 during the boot up and such... (its the preconfigured bare one from the slack install) it only started doing this after i tried to boot a kernel that wasnt there (it went to a black screen) then changed that symlink and rebooted my old kernel


oh and in my /lib/modules directory i have 2 subdirs for the corresponding kernel versions, so i dont see a problem there.

You checked messages and syslog, and neither of them show anything when you try to login?

yea sorry,..... syslog just contains some errors from along time ago (soundcore stuff i got rid of) but it worked after i removed the generic insmod statements that came w/ the distro

could you do a 'tail -100 /var/log/syslog |grep -v MARK" ? and let us know whether there have been any successfull/unsucessfull attempts to log?
if you do not see any failed logons there could be a problem getting to the /var or any other filesystem (not /etc because it still seems to be able to get ssh, mysql and apache running); check /etc/fstab

could you try to boot the 2.6 kernel now that it's in place? does it give the same problem?

Ok using that command i get some failed insmods for snd-ens1371 for /lib/modules/2.4.26/kernal/sound/acore/snd.o.gz from the 4th of October but i cleared that up a while ago...

I will boot that other kernel and give it a try.... and post my results here in a little bit

my 2.6 kernel doesnt even work... something is messed up somewhere... i deleted it and rebooted and started up the old 2.4 kernel and it still does the same thing

i copied the bare.i image from the slack 10 cd to /boot and and added it to lilo.conf, ran lilo to update and rebooted and selected the test kernel from my lilo boot menu and it does the exact same thing as before.

oh and /var is accessible mysql loads its data from /var/lib/mysql

and my fstab looks fine here is a copy of it