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I have a server with a hosting provider (OVH). I've never had any trouble logging in via SSH, but I use RSA authentication, so I'm not sure if I could actually get in with a password. However, when attempting to log in via iKVM (IPMI), I always get a Login incorrect error. I've tried both my own account and root; neither work, no matter how many times I update the passwords. /etc/shadow looks fine; I see valid hashes for both accounts. Here's what shows up in /var/log/auth.log:

Apr 18 18:12:08 mc-0 login[5258]: pam_unix(login:auth): authentication failure; logname=LOGIN uid=0 euid=0 tty=/dev/tty1 ruser= rhost=  user=paul
Apr 18 18:12:12 mc-0 login[5258]: FAILED LOGIN (1) on '/dev/tty1' FOR 'paul', Authentication failure

I've tried other terminals (tty2, etc.), too, with no luck. X isn't installed, so there's no GUI, just a CLI.

I don't see anything unusual in /etc/pam.d/*, but I don't know my way around those files too well. /etc/securetty has the console, some X displays, tty{1..63}, ttyS{0..5}, a bunch of other obscure tty{something}{number} entries, some stuff for LXC, and duart{0,1}.

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  • Have you tried directly ssh'ing into the server and using password authentication? If that fails and you know your user/password is correct there should be a directive in /etc/ssh/sshd_config that is something like PasswordAuthentication yes Which could be commented out, or set to No. This would block all programs using ssh from logging in via password. Apr 18, 2015 at 22:46
  • @BrianSizemore I currently have PasswordAuthentication set to no, and I'd like to keep it that way. SSH is working fine; it's direct terminal access that's the problem.
    – Zenexer
    Apr 20, 2015 at 3:21

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I was using caps-lock for part of my password. I'm used to caps-lock lagging a bit on Linux, but it was lagging a lot more than normal and generally being unreliable over iKVM.

And I was all ready to dive into the PAM source code...

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