This was a strange one. One of the newer computers at the lab where I moonlight, running Ubuntu 11.04 (yes, I probably should upgrade to the next LTS, I guess), suddenly stopped logging in. This was preceded by a pink screen and a bunch of errors about the harddrive (so they tell me; I wasn't there. oh, the lives of not IT folk - like living underwater).
So now, whenever they logged in through the GUI, nothing happened - click the user, type the password, straight back to login screen.
So I ctrl alt F1 to TTY1, and log in, and the only error I got was:
"error in service module". Not helpful.
Googling that was helpful in that it started to point the blame at PAM, or Pluggable Authentication Modules, which I now know way too much about.
But anyway I ended up booting into recovery mode which got me past the login, and then overwriting the /etc/init/tty1.conf to skip login even when not in recovery mode following this advice, which allowed me to access the internet and external drives on the machine.
Then I realized that ubuntu logs everything, and I checked /var/log/auth.log, which mentioned a bunch of missing files in /etc/pam.d/ and other fun places. All such fun directories were empty. very strange. So I copied over all of the files from another ubuntu machine into said directories, including a bunch of .so files, and what do you know, login worked. That simple.
Moral of the story - read the logs when something goes wrong that you don't understand. Ubuntu writes a lot of logs, and there's a reason for that. I know I made it seem easy here but it probably took 2-3 hours to do all of the above. facepalms: 4
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