Help needed understanding missing authentication module 1

[wilville]

I recently upgraded a workstation to RHEL 3 and then had to download and install a driver for an odd monitor that the user dearly loves. The driver installer wants X-windows shut down during the install and so requires that you drop to runlevel 3 to do it. Fine. Edit inittab and start over. RONG! In runlevel 3 it would not allow me to log in as anyone. Entering the login id and pressing return just took me IMMEDIATELY to a new login prompt. I tried going to runlevel 1 to do the install - yeah I keep a rescue disk handy in cases like this. The installer did not like that either, and insisted on runlevel 3. Looking in the log files I find that it was trying to load /lib/security/pam_unix2.so but could not find it. I cannot find it there either, nor anywhere else on that machine. Am I right in guessing that this is the cause of my problem? Can this be rectified by simply loading this module from somewhere? Like install media? Or is there more to do to fix it? Or is something besides me confused here?

Thanks ...

Wilville (who has a brother Orbur)

 

[ericbrunson]

If you don't use the strange monitor and uninstall the driver, can you log in?

 

[wilville]

No. I cannot get into a state to be able to start the install, so I am running without it or the monitor at the moment. I have a vanilla monitor on there just keep going. And still I am having trouble.

Wilville (who has a brother Orbur)

 

[ericbrunson]

It looks like you've installed something that added a pam requirement that can't be satisfied. First, do this:

grep -l pam_unix2.so /etc/pam.d/*

That will tell you what service is requiring the pam_unix2.so, and this:

grep -l pam_unix2.so /etc/pam.d/* | xargs rpm -qf

Will tell you the rpm that installed it. You can probably comment out any lines that require the missing module, on my system xscreensaver has a commented line for that very thing.

 

[wilville]

I shall try this and see what I get. May get to the bottom of it yet! Thanks for pointing me in what sure appears to be a promising direction.

Wilville (who has a brother Orbur)

 

[wilville]

And sure enough it worked. I got in at the level I needed to. The install still failed, but that is for other reasons. Thanks be to ericbrunson for the right direction to look. As it turns out, someone in the head office tried to be "helpful" and sent out a distribution that is half RedHat and half Suse, but he forgot to supply the Suse parts that the control files are now calling for. Remind me why mixing these things is not that good an idea. :^)

Wilville (Who has a brother Orbur)