I'm having a problem with Redhat Fedora that is hard to describe. I
log in as root or other user, as soon as I enter password, something
flashes up on the screen & I'm returned to the login prompt. I have
same issue regardless of whether I'm logging in locally or remotely
via SSH.

I've logged into single user mode & changed the password thinking it
may be a login issue, this does not help.

I need to know how to hunt down the problem & fix it without an OS
reload. I've looked at /var/log/messages, didn't see anything that
sticks out, however, I'm not real sure what I'm looking for.

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Request for Question Clarification by eiffel-ga on 11 Apr 2004 05:56 PDT

Hi hochschild,

Are you getting this problem when you attempt to log into a console
(in multi-user mode), or are you attempting to log into a GUI
environment such as KDE or Gnome?

eiffel-ga

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Clarification of Question by hochschild-ga on 11 Apr 2004 09:14 PDT

I'm attempting to log into console mode.

Usually after logging in, there is a little script that is in your
home directory that gets executed, I am not exactly sure which file
but it starts with a . (dot) and it is located in the home directory
of the root user, could be in /home/root Just check it out and see
that there isn't a command which executes a log out command.

Did you try loggin in with a user then get root access from there?
Basically after loggin in with a normal account, enter 'su' and then
followed by your root password. See what happens there.

Cheers

The file sikocan is referring to is called ".bash_profile" and is
normally found in the /root directory in a Fedora install - but if you
know about things like ssh and single-user mode you probably already
know about things like that file.

Still, as sikocan suggests, it's probably worth having a look in
there. It probably does nothing more than setting and exporting a few
environment variables, and executing ("sourcing") /root/.bashrc if it
exists, which on my system sets a few aliases and executes ("sources")
/etc/bashrc which does lots of things but probably shouldn't have been
changed since the original install (check the file modified time).

If nothing else you can add a line to .bash_profile to echo a message
to a file to see how far your login is getting before it logs out.

I've added "ls -al" to .bash_profile
ls doesn't run, so whatever is broken breaks before .base_profile

The problem affects user root as well as another user I configured in
single user mode.