[SlugLUG] I need some UCSC network-guru help

[Erich Blume]

Hi,

    I've recently had an account created for me to work on the soe servers
so that I can work on some projects with the bioinformatics department.
However, the default shell on these servers is tcsh, and with a prompt I
find ugly and uninformative. I decided, during my spare time (it really
isn't, of course, that huge of a deal) to change my default shell to bash,
and to set up a nice .bashrc file for myself.

    Big mistake. Either the soe servers use a different system for shell
configuration than my home machine, or else the soe admins hate bash. Long
story short, I've "shorted out" my login, and it just fails ( Permission
denied (publickey,password,keyboard-interactive,hostbased). ) every time I
attempt to log in. I'm fairly certain I'm typing my password correctly (the
help ticket page on the SOE techstaff website accepted my username and
password), so I really don't know exactly what's going on.

    I know some UCSC network staff listen to this list, and I also know that
many of you are masters of linux (well, obviously), so I thought asking here
might help. So yes, any insight as to why I'm being locked out of my account
would help, as well as any advice on how to set up a good shell environment
on the soe servers.

    Here's the long story, if someone thinks they need it, quoted directly
from my SOE ticket:

" I'm not a fan of tcsh, and so tried to set my default shell to bash.
However, the cse servers apparently do not accept /bin/bash as a login
shell, so I had to use, as I recall, /opt/local/bin/bash (but that might
be entirely wrong). So I typed "chsh" to run the change-shell script,
and it told me to run "ypchsh" instead, as that updates the network (NI
something, if I recall correctly) preferences. I ran that instead, and
was given the usual prompt. I entered the correct bash path (as gathered
by "which bash"), and everything was fine, except that that bash
appeared to not read the .bashrc (probably because the shell I specified
never runs in interactive mode, and so never reads .bashrc, as it is
strictly a login shell).

Immiediatly after successfully changing the shell, I logged out with
"exit" to try to log in again, and it worked - but it didn't read
.bashrc. So I decided to try tcsh again to see if I could get it to read
from .cshrc (as that is more important to me than using my preferred
shell). I used ypchsh again, made the change, then logged out.
Immiediatly, I was unable to log in again. Either the tcsh shell I
specified is bad (e.g. a fake shell), or else I somehow otherwise messed
up my login scripts. It should be noted that, as I recall, the .cshrc
file I left in my home dir did NOT belong to me (I was using it to
construct my .bashrc file), and so that file itself might contain
security measures that are keeping me from logging on."

Many thanks (and keep up the interesting emails - I don't post much, but I
like reading what you all send!),
Erich Blume