I have an issue that i have never come across before. I have 1 user on a server who cannot login. When they connect using Putty and put in the login id and password the session is terminated. It is as if they had /usr/bin/false in /etc/passwd but they dont. This is the password entry;
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No solution, alas, from my side, but a bunch of ideas:
Have you checked /usr/bin/sh to be what it should be: an executable containing a shell?
Maybe in your system there is a list of allowed login shells maintained. Is /usr/bin/sh among them? (I had this once when a user changed his login shell to bash on an AIX system and then couldn't log in.)
Are the rights for /usr/bin/sh (and its parent directories) set correctly so that the user can execute it?
Anyways, i hope you post the solution once you find it. This sounds interesting.
Have you run the password file syntax checker "pwck" ?
In my browser display of you post the 6th character of the password line is a smiley face not a colon. I can't see a proper colon separator between field 1 (username) and field 2 (encrypted password). Maybe you have a bad character in the password file. If so, remember to use "vipw" not "vi".
We do use NIS (of which i have no experience having only joined this company last week) so i dont know if that makes any difference. It just seems odd that it only effects this one user....
I will do some more looking around but if anyone has any other ideas on where to look please let me know.
we have similar issues when the homedir doesnt exist or is owned by the wrong / another user or has unsufficient permissions or when the .profile in the homedir is pointing to another shell that doesn't exist on the box - eg bash. Did you check this?