[SOLVED] Locked out

[bhutan]

HI i am literally locked out. using centos 5.8 and all of a sudden i got this


"Your session only lasted less than 10 seconds. If you have not logged out yourself, this could mean that there is some installation problem or that you may be out of disk space. Try logging in with one of the failsafe sessions to see if you can fix this problem"


i did Alt+Ctrl+F2 and tried logging though the terminal but there also it failed to log in. whenever i enter the password, i m prompted the user name and it is a vicious loop.

I tired all the session options on the log in screen, last session, fail-safe all in vain. i cannot afford to lose or re-install the server as i have tons of data and files on it.

all help will be highly regarded please.

further, until yesterday i was using Putty and ssh but now putty also exits the moment i enter my password. i do not have any users created except root.

[bob]

move to Linux Chat since it's CentOS, rather than Fedora.

[Magickman]

That very same has happened to me before. Running Vector Linux, and running Fedora 9. I believe it is called a loop, and involves a scripting error of some kind. I had to reinstall both times.

[ocratato]

Some possible reasons for this behaviour include a full file system, or too many processes. Both of these might be resolved by a reboot.

If the problem persists I would be getting out a LiveCD distribution and booting with that. Then you can try to determine what is causing the problem. There should be some clues in the logs.


Then...

1/ Create one or more ordinary users so you don't accidentally mess up the system.

2/ Buy an external USB drive and make a backup of your stuff.

[bhutan]

Try turning off SELinux at boot.
When the grub splash screen is displayed press any key.
Select the Linux boot choice and press the 'e' key.
Select the kernel line and press the 'e' key again.
At the end of the line add a space followed by selinux=0.
When done press the 'Enter' key followed by the 'b' key.
If you can log on then you need to adjust your SELinux security policy or disable SELinux permanently.