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Situation: Poking around some system files in /etc/
Problem: I managed to accidentally rm-ed some files, including /etc/pam.d/password-auth and /etc/pam.d/system-auth (don't ask...)
Question: What are the ramifications (if any) of removing such files? I dare not log out or reboot for now.
Additional information: Machine is running CentOS 7. Will also be interested to know ramifications on top of just replacing the files.
Assuming you've still got root, this will restore the two files you've named
cd /etc/pam.d
ln -s password-auth-ac password-auth
ln -s system-auth-ac system-auth
Test by using a new session to login with ssh. (If necessary, ssh localhost from the machine itself.) If the login succeeds then you've fixed it - without these files you cannot authenticate or authorise any session for any work. (In the /etc/pam.d directory you can grep -l system-auth * and grep -l password-auth * to see which services were affected. It makes for unpleasant reading.)
