this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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[FIXED] unable to login after update 6.8.7 (lemmy.ml)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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i did update my machine with pacman -Syu. after rebooting, i cannot login. i con see this error Failed to start Virtual Console Setup a tiny second right before log in screen. i had to capture it in slow mo to able to read it. i attach the image below.

and on the login, after i enter my username and hit enter it just hangs for a while without asking the password and asks for username again. it acts like when you enter wrong password.

Fix

turns out /bin some how got messed up. thanks to @wwwgem, i looked into system logs (journalctl) and fixed it

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Took me three days to scroll through this post on my subscribed list in Photon on my phone. 😆

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

sorry for that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Not your fault. I was surprised at the behavior. Lemmy should handle that better. A post in the subscribed list IMO should be more like an abstract or excerpt, with the full text only available when viewing the post.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

And we're only seeing votes and responses from people that didn't say fuck it and abandon the thread! Is a link to pastebin or something really that much harder than dumping your entire lengthy log file here?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

That warning comes up if you are using sd-vconsole but do not have systemd in the mkinitcpio hooks. You should fix that but it is most likely unrelated to the login issue.

Login issues normally hint at either the user shell or pam configs being wrong but you can also get this behavior if (the users home directory is on a secondary disk && that disk failed to mount && you aren't using systemd-homed).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

sorry for late reply. yeah, my /bin got messed up somehow, thats why it couldnt find the essentials, more likely bash

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Cool, saw your logs just a while ago with the error about being unable to execute /bin/sh so I figured as much. What did you do to get there? I've never had an update fumble that hard...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I'm my experience usually you get assigned a home dir of "/" and a warning message if your home directory can't be found. But you can login.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

agetty[349]: tty1: can't exec /bin/login: No such file or directory

Well there’s your problem.

Login gets called to check if the username you put in is in the list of users and if it is it asks for a password (behavior subject to configuration). If you don’t have /bin/login you can’t login!

Advice to fix arch is as follows: boot from usb, chroot to your environment and use the built in tools to fix it automatically.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Hmm does chroot sidestep login? Or could you mount it from the usb's filesystem?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Chroot sidesteps login entirely. When you use chroot you're always root and you don't need the password of the machine you're chrooting into.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

I'll put the link to the wiki here again ;) https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chroot

"Run arch-chroot with the new root directory as first argument:

# arch-chroot /path/to/new/root

You can now do most of the operations available from your existing installation. Some tasks which needs D-Bus will not work as noted in #Usage"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

yeah thats exactly what i did. fixed it. sorry for late reply

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

No apology necessary, did you figure out what caused it or weather some binaries were missing or just had screwy permissions?

E: just saw your update. Nice job!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

To investigate the issue you may want to use a bootable drive and chroot into your system. This will allow you to see any error messages using the journactl command. Once you know what's going on exactly you'll be able to fix it or get a better assistance from people here or on the Arch forum.
I know someone who encountered the exact same login behavior after this update. It appeared that some packages were broken and he had to reinstall them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

sorry for late reply. thanks to you, i fixed it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Glad you're back on tracks! Looks like this update messed up /bin for some people. I love when OPs like you take time to close their first post with the resolution. Thank you. If you have time to quickly summarize the details of the fix that may benefit others as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Try spamming the space bar on startup and choosing an older kernel

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

sorry for late reply. i fixed it but i wanna know this option. i tried hitting space bar, but nothing showed up

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

In the past it was the Shift button for Grub, but apparently not for UEFI setups https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB/Tips_and_tricks#Hide_GRUB_unless_the_Shift_key_is_held_down so I guess if you want the Grub menu to be visible at startup you'd do some editing. As far as I know systemd-boot does show a menu with fall-back kernel.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm curious about this because I had a bunch of dracut warnings when I updated my EndeavourOS to 6.8.7 the other day. Seeing this doesn't make me too keen on rebooting until I've updated without error messages...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

nothing can go wrong as long as you have a live usb ig

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Oh, in the end I just pulled a $ sudo dracut --regenerate-all --force to generate a working initramfs. ~~But did you find a solution to your problem?~~ Glad you found a fix!