Re: Is something wrong with my account?

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

On Sat, 23 Dec 2000, Sarah Heacock wrote:
> 
> My account: sarah
> 
> Everytime I log in, it is logging me right back out again.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Sarah Heacock

     When we add new users, we take permissions off of /bin/passwd and a few
related commands that can modify the passwd files to prevent a corrupted file
resulting from a user trying to do something which modifies the file such as
change their password, realname, or shell, while we are adding users to it. 

     Chris was adding users and mistyped chmod 100 /bin/passwd as chmod 100
/bin passwd.

     This had the rather unfortunate effect of taking away permissions to the
/bin directory where many critical system binaries are located.

     Chris began to receive complaints from people with respect to the shell
server.  He rebooted it not knowing what the cause of the problems were and
hoping that would clear it up.  It didn't. 

     I had been asleep for about two hours when this happened, Chris called and
I managed to drag my butt out of bed and find what was wrong and fix this
particular problem. 

     However, people still reported difficulty getting logged in.  The problem
was a familiar one, something didn't have permissions between the users
directories and root and so anything that tries to walk back to determine the
current working directory, and unfortunately bash and all csh derivatives do
this, failed, and so anybody using those shells could not login. 

     Again I got up, and checked all the directories from the users directories
back to root, all looked ok.  Then I took the system down to single user mode
and found that the mount point was not ok.  This is something that had to have
been hosed since we moved the files to a new server but for some reason it did
not appear to cause problems until after the reboot. 

     That's fixed now and everything with the shell server should be back to
"normal".