# login: PAM Failure, aborting:Critical Error -immediate abort

## someguy

login: PAM Failure, aborting:Critical Error -immediate abort 

omg please help lol i finally got gentoo on my ibm 600e laptop  (480 mhz 96 mgs ram) so id REALLY like toget this error fixed i get this whenever i try to login any help would be appreciated i trried rechrooting and checking etc-update nothing also tried resetting and removing the password but that doesnt matter because it wont even hand me a login promp i would really appreciate some help here guys

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## someguy

oh yeh i used knoppix to install since i couldnt get the 2004.1 cd to boot onto it nomatter what i dont know if this may have caused the problem its the first time ive used knoppix to install gentoo i did knoppix 2 )txt only( thanks

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## someguy

anyone ?

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## someguy

crap *bump*

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## someguy

anyone ?

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## tuam

Me too!

This is an IBM ThinkPad 760el (Yes, Pentium 133).

I can boot into bash with

```
Gentoo init=/bin/bash
```

from the Lilo prompt. In "less /var/log/messages" I can see that some files are missing. Actually there is no file at all in /etc/pam.d. I'm trying to copy one from my other box.

I can tell you what happens later.

FF,

 Daniel

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## tuam

I can login successfully now.

It took the following steps

```
ln -s /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /dev/hda1

mount -o remount,rw /

nano /etc/pam.d/login

```

```
#%PAM-1.0

auth       required     /lib/security/pam_securetty.so

auth       required     /lib/security/pam_stack.so service=system-auth

auth       required     /lib/security/pam_nologin.so

account    required     /lib/security/pam_stack.so service=system-auth

password   required     /lib/security/pam_stack.so service=system-auth

session    required     /lib/security/pam_stack.so service=system-auth

session    optional     /lib/security/pam_console.so

```

```
nano /etc/pam.d/system-auth
```

```
#%PAM-1.0

auth       required     /lib/security/pam_env.so

auth       sufficient   /lib/security/pam_unix.so likeauth nullok

auth       required     /lib/security/pam_deny.so

account    required     /lib/security/pam_unix.so

password   required     /lib/security/pam_cracklib.so retry=3

password   sufficient   /lib/security/pam_unix.so nullok md5 shadow use_authtok

password   required     /lib/security/pam_deny.so

session    required     /lib/security/pam_limits.so

session    required     /lib/security/pam_unix.so

```

```
mount -o remount,ro /

sync

/sbin/reboot
```

However I don't know which part of my stage1 installation was wrong  :Confused: 

Good luck and FF,

 Daniel

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## sun4384

I don't understand why this problem still exists.......... It has been around for a very long time and still not fixed....

I chrooted into the gentoo installation and executed USE="pam" emerge shadow, and things work. This problem should be fixed or documented in the gentoo handbook.

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## madmango

ouch, my gentoo hurts. this fixed it.

has anybody filed a bug report?

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## Phlogiston

Hi, this problem still exist and should be fixed very soon!  I have here a fresh gentoo 2004.2 installation... 

Has anybody already filed a bug?

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## CompNerd

This also happened to me.  Apparently, the cause of this is a bad compile for sys-apps/shadow.  The following worked very well for me.

```
emerge -v shadow
```

HTH

CompNerd

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