[riskym]

Hi,
I'm pretty new to Linux and would appreciate your thoughts on this: I have a number of accounts on my system and used to be able to log in with any of them. Recently, something must have changed as I can no longer log in with anything but the root account. I first noticed this when using PuTTY for remote access.
This is where it gets a little bizarre! If I try to log on with an account other than root and I type an incorrect password I am informed that the password is incorrect and prompted to enter it again. If I type the correct password returned to the login prompt. If I do the same using PuTTY I am returned to the login prompt if I enter an incorrect password and if I enter the correct password the session ends with an error (Network error: software caused connection abort).
If I log in as root and su to another account I receive a permission denied message but if I type whoami the account appears to be the specified user. If I su - to the new account I do not receive an error message. This may, of course be totally unrelated!
I did find an article that suggested that the problem mat be related to permissions on some files / directories. The following was correct:
/etc 755
bashrc 644
/home/useraccount directory 740

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.

[bigtomrodney]

What is the default shell for each of these users? If they are disabled it might be something like /bin/false.

awk -F: '{print $7}' </etc/passwd

That would explain them logging out again.

[riskym]

Thanks for the quick response. The default shell for the users is /bin/bash. There are a couple of (old) accounts that are set to bin/false but not the ones that I have been using.

[shank_el]

there are many issues tht can keep someone from logging in (beside the file permission that u say have already checked)
i ll try address few of them

1. nologin -> ur shell mightbe false or nologin, sheck in /etc/passwd to see ur shell
2.expired acount -> chage -l username wil display the acc info
3. user being locked -> if u see "!" before the encrypted passwd of tht user in /etc/shadow try usermod -U username this will unlock the account
4.check for missing /etc/shadow or /etc/passwd or /etc/group or /etc/securetty (or commented tty name in last file), bust since u can log in as superuser this hardly can be the case. if u identify the problem as one of these do get back i ll may try givin the workin solution in detail

[riskym]

Thanks for the ideas:
shell is ok
accounts are not expired
No ! before passwords in passwd file
All files are in place
Back to the drawing board .....