Help! Red hat doesn't recognize any usernames!

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

> Are you still unable to login as root?  Have you tried booting directly
> into single user mode?
>
> Joshua A. Richardson
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Sent: Thursday, October 08, 2009 9:51 AM
> To: 'General Red Hat Linux discussion list'; Rajiv.baxi at netzero.net
> Subject: RE: Help! Red hat doesn't recognize any usernames!
>
> Hi Rajiv,
>
> It's Red Hat Enterprise 4, and it's local Authentication. (No Ldap.)
> It'sbizarre, really.
>
> After it crashed, it came up, but doesn't recognize any usernames at
> all. I did a repair, and looked at the /etc/passwd file and it was fine. It
> seems the system cannot read from the file. I checked permissions, reset
them, on
> that and the shadow file, and still, the system cannot recognize logons.
>
> Is there a daemon that is used for this that may not be starting up?

Have you checked /etc/pam.d, and maybe even /etc/nsswitch.conf to see if
they're ok, and permissions correct?

Hmmm, have you seen any numeric permissions? Have you checked /etc/group?
Or maybe the shadow passwd file?

      mark