RHL 7.1 won't allow console login, gui login okay 2

[mlbrady]

I installed Red Hat Linux 7.1 on a brand new Compaq Proliant M370 server. Had a crash and had to reinstall. Set to autostart level 5. After the reinstall, system hangs at xserver start (gray screen, x mouse cursor), before gui login. Ctl-Alt-Bcksp kills xserver, restarts xserver and finally displays the gui login. From there I can login using root. I want to use Xconfigurator to see if I can fix the problem. However, when I switch to a console, I cannot login. No matter what user account I try, I get dropped back to a login prompt, with no error messages. MD5 and shadow passwords are enabled, but why would this be a password problem, when I can login from one interface, but not the other?

 

[RhythmAce]

while in GUI mode try your menu and go to : Programs > System > then click on "Text Mode Tool Menu" and see if it lets you in that way. You should see X Configuration at the bottom of the menu when it pops up. Hope this helps other than that you may have to do a clean install.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

If you want to change the default run-level to console mode just edit /etc/inittab so that the initdefault line has a 3 instead of 5, i.e. so it looks like this :

id:3:initdefault:

If you just can't get that far - reboot the machine and exit the graphical lilo screen with control-x . When you get the boot: prompt at the bottom of the screen type 'linux 3' it looks like this :

boot: linux 3

....and press enter. The system will stop at run-level three (multi-user console mode) and you should be able to logon and fix the problem.

Rgds

 

[mlbrady]

Thanks for the information, but I guess I should be more specific that the real problem here is that I cannot login from a console. I've already tried using run-level three, which further confirmed that I cannot login from console. I booted to single-user mode to see if there was a problem with the passwd file and ran rpm to check for package corruptions, but found nothing. I should also clarify that this is the second time I've reinstalled and continue to have the same problem. I can reinstall again, but it doesn't seem to be helping.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

Hmmm... One possibility is that its a PAM problem of some kind. You could try to change /etc/pam.d/login to reduce the number of authentication modules - especially the pam_securetty.so module because that one is the only extra one vs xdm.

Rgds

 

[mlbrady]

Thank-you for the additional information. After 3 days of fiddling with the server, both problems seem to have resolved themselves. I cannot explain it, since I have done nothing that actually changed anything on the server. I was going to check the PAM modules as suggested, but gnome or xserver had locked up. I could not ctl-atl-del from the xserver console, so I switched to another console. Just for kicks I decided to try to login. It worked. I rebooted the server to see if it was just a fluke, but it worked again. I ran Xconfigurator, accepting all the defaults, and now xserver seems to be working fine. I wish I could document what might have fixed it, but I really didn't do anything outside of looking at various configuration files, trying to run Xconfigurator, and verifying all packages with RPM. My thanks to ifincham and RhythmAce for the useful tips. I am a beginner to Linux and haven't used a Unix-based system for over 10 years, so the information was helpful to me outside of the immediate problems with my server.