Fedora 12 Login not working

[meton_magis]

I have a Fedora 12 server that I've been using as a server for the past few months. Everything has been going ok. I built it to be used as a home theater PC as well as a proxy server (for when I need to use public wifi) and file server for my home network, nothing too complicated. I wanted to watch some stuff on the server, and needed to change the graphics to the nvidia proprietary driver. I did it just as I've done it on my desktop and laptop, by adding "rdblacklist=nouveau" to the end of the kernel line in grub, rebooting, and installing the kmod-nvidia from rpmfusion's yum repo. When I did so, it updated my kernel to the latest version, along with some other stuff that I didn't pay much attention to.

Before I rebooted, I changed my default runlevel to 3. When it came back, I couldn't login. None of my userIDs (to include root) were working. I rebooted into single user mode, and tried to reset my passwords ...... no userIDs were recognized, not even root. I checked /etc/passwd, shadow, group, gshadow, nsswitch.conf, all files were there, all had proper permissions (as far as I know) and all seemed intact and contained what they should. None of my pam files look like they were mangled, but it is just not recognizing userIDs. Even when I boot up regularly into level 3, processes like SSH say "error, unrecognized user ssh" or something like that.

I've checked everything I could think of, nothing makes sense to me. I was going to try to run yum update, hoping that updating everything would fix it, but I can't get the network working in single user mode, and I can't login on anything highger. I tried attaching the hard drive (it's external) to my desktop, chrooting, and running yum update, but my server is running i686, my desktop is running x86_64. When I tried updating, it tried to install a slew of 64 bit rpms.

Anyone have any ideas on how I can fix this? I've almost come to accept that I'm gonna have to reinstall, but am probably going to wait for fedora 13 if I take that route. I know it's bleeding edge, but hey, I'm a glutton for punishment (plus I like to find the little problems, makes me feel like I contribute to the community.)

[aroach31291]

That is very odd, I am going to assume it's probably and issue with PAM (damn PAM and it's difficulty!), what does your /etc/pam.d/login file look like?

Here is mine:

#%PAM-1.0
auth       required     pam_shells.so
auth       include      system-auth
auth       optional     pam_securetty.so

account    required     pam_nologin.so
account    include      system-auth

password   include      system-auth

session    include      system-auth
session    required     pam_mkhomedir.so skel=/etc/skel/ umask=0022
session    optional     pam_lastlog.so nowtmp
session    optional     pam_mail.so dir=/var/mail standard