System is booting up. Unprivileged users are not permitted to log in yet

Question

Is there a way (other than permit root login on the target machine) to work-around the following:

$ ssh 192.168.0.14
user@192.168.0.14's password:
"System is booting up. Unprivileged users are not permitted to log in yet. Please come back later. For technical details, see pam_nologin(8)."

I am trying to debug remotely a failure to start an X session.

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At this time, the following link is not working for me:

• https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/8228

Answer 1

This issue may come from /run/nologin. /run/nologin is created by systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service. It is then removed by systemd-user-sessions.service.

So you have to delete this:

$ ls -l /run/nologin
# rm /run/nologin

Let us know if it works! Good Luck!