set samba password now can't login

Question

In trying to get samba server configured on my Fedora I used the following command to set a password:

sudo smbpasswd -a user

'user' also happens to be the main user account on the system: the one I log in to the KDE desktop with. After rebooting, my autologon no longer works instead it prompts me for a password. Now neither my original logon password nor the password I set for samba will get me in to the desktop. They are two different passwords. My original password seems to almost work, the login screen goes away for a moment and I get blackness but it immediately comes back with the login again. Whereas anything else I type (including the password I set for the samba user) just do nothing but clear the password field.

My question then is, how do I fix this situation? I tried to SSH in but it seems the SSH deamon isn't running.

Answer 1

I have used Samba server long ago. After creating user and password for the user using the following command sudo smbpasswd -a user
Before rebooting perform the following task.

You have to add user to the smbuser file

sudo vi /etc/samba/smbusers

Add in the following line, substituting the username with the one you want to give access to. The format is = “”.

<user> = “<user>”

Feel free to ask if you can't proceed further.

Answer 2

Login from your tty. Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 or F2 to get tty login. Try to login from there and try to change the things mentioned by Ruban. If still login doesn't work, that means there might be some issue with your /etc/pam.d/login file. The solution is to boot your system in single user mode and change the file as required.

Answer 3

Your Samba password is irrelevant at login time. Your login password is still working for logging in, but your session is interrupted soon afterwards. The problem is not related to your Samba password, it's something else you must have done around the same time.

Try logging in text mode: press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to switch to a text console. If that works, run something like

ls -Altr ~
find ~ /etc -mtime -1

to see what files you've changed recently (adjust the time according to when you made those changes). One of them is presumably the culprit. You may also look for clues in the transcript of your X session, which many systems store in ~/.xsession-errors (this depends on the distribution, on the display manager and on the session manager, I don't know for sure that KDE on Fedora uses this file name). How to solve the problem will depend on what you find.

If you don't manage to log into your account, log into a different account, then hop on to the root account to investigate. Alternatively, if you can't log into your shell account but have (S)FTP access, you may use use it to move problematic configuration files out of the way.