Can't login

[ekenna]

I am new to Linux. This weekend I installed red hat 7.0 through the text mode onto 2nd hard drive (dual boot Win 98 on the 1st). I originally had it going into X windows Gnome and when I tried to login and the login screen goes away for a little while and then comes back. Read the docs/howtos and figured out how to run in single mode (after booting from a floppy). Changed the level in inittab from 5 to 3 so I could see what was going on. Tried to change the password with passwd thinking it would take what I entered and encrypt it before storing it to shadow (wrong! the MAN says something about return value of CRYPT function but I could not find anything in MAN or INFO on crypt) I saw that what I gave passwd was in the shadow file. Looked around and found linuxconfig (I think) and used it to enter passwords for my 2 regular users. now when I type login and user the username and password I get segmentation failure. BTW I can not log in as root I think because I used underscore in the password.
Questions:
What is segmentation failure and how do I fix it?
How do I change roots password since that was not an option in linuxconfig and passwd is expecting it already encrypted? :confused:

[njcajun]

Couple of things that *might* help, but only a little :)

Check to make sure you didn't delete a colon or something by accident in your inittab file. Also, you ARE allowed to use an underscore in your password, so that's not a problem. The only other thing I can think of is maybe your distro does something funky with lilo.conf when you change your inittab? I dunno.

BTW, I wouldn't recommend booting to runlevel 5. This is one reason why.

Check your /var/log/messages and dmesg for helpful info.

[njcajun]

Have you tried logging in remotely? You don't have to be logged in on the console to log in over the network. That way you can fix your files and stuff, and you'd be using a different tool to login. Either it'll work, or it'll give you an error that may contain s'more info.

[njcajun]

Have you tried logging in remotely? You don't have to be logged in on the console to log in over the network. That way you can fix your files and stuff, and you'd be using a different tool to login. Either it'll work, or it'll give you an error that may contain s'more info.

[ekenna]

I do not have a NIC so remote login is not possable. Could Ker something security be conflicting with shadow passwords?

[ekenna]

I finally found out what it was. I logged in as linux single and removed the password part of /etc/shadow for one of the users. I then got a login prompt but no password prompt. So then I started to look in the pam.d dir at the login file and noticed a secure-auth file with the same stuff as the login only it had a LADP line. I looked at several other files and saw a comment about these setting would be reset by running auth-config. So I ran it and removed any reference to LADP server and kerbos server and then it worked. I can login as a regular user. Thanks for the help.