Re: Lost User

Don Flinn wrote:

On Thu, 2005-11-17 at 10:30 -0500, Don Flinn wrote:

On Thu, 2005-11-17 at 09:55 +0100, Thomas Widhalm wrote:

Am Mittwoch, den 16.11.2005, 23:26 -0500 schrieb Don Flinn:

Hi

The other week I was trying to remove OpenOffice to install OpenOffice
2.0 because of the repeated crashing of the Fedora version of
OpenOffice.  Somehow, I made my login inoperable.  When I tried to login
the screen went blank for some time then came back to the login screen.
Logging in as root I created another user.  Although I can reach the old
user directories through /home/oldusr it is a real pain especially with
my eudora mail (can't read my old mail).  I tried to recreate the
password for the old user by using passwd, but that didn't cure my
problem.  Anyone have a solution to get my old user login to work again.

Hi!

I encountered a similar problem, with /home directories mounted via NFS
on a SuSE box. When I tried to log in without having my own home, I
crashed back to the login screen while using X.

Does your home (and the files in it) still belong to you? And are the
permissions set the appropriate way?

Greetings,
Thomas

Don

--
Thomas Widhalm
University of Salzburg, Austria
IT- Services
Systems Management
Unix Systems
pgp/gpg Key: 6265BAE6

I think that is the problem.  looking at /var/messages after the failed
login attempt I see:

Nov 17 09:54:00 flinn gdm[2561]: gdm_slave_session_start: /home/donfl is
not owned by uid 502.
Nov 17 09:54:00 flinn gdm[2561]: gdm_auth_user_add: /home/donfl is not
owned by uid 502.

Looking at /etc/passwd:
donfl:x:502:503:Don Flinn:/home/donfl:/bin/bash

Should that be 502:502 ?
I'm still a newbe at linux but am trying to learn.

Don



Don Flinn
President, Flint Security LLC
Tel: 781-856-7230
Fax: 781-631-7693
e-mail: flinn@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://flintsecurity.com

Problem Solved:  The home directory for the lost user was owned by root.
I evidently made that mistake when trying to remove OpenOffice, although
I don't remember doing it.  Changing ownership back to the lost user
solved the problem.

Thanks all for your help.

Don

"Simplicity baffles the complex mind."

I have come across it so, so many times.

Robin