Cannot login to lxplus ?

These instructions are for when you are unable to login to lxplus because of a mistake you made when editing your login scripts. (lesson learned: "I should not have logged out but opened a new terminal session to test my login first ... ".)

A possible way to fix this would be to change your shell to something else (recommend /bin/ksh) temporarily and to only get ssh login access. Here are the instructions:

• Go to this web page (login if needed)
  • https://resources.web.cern.ch/resources/Manage/Linux/Settings.aspx
  • Make a note of your current shell (/bin/bash or /bin/zsh ?)
  • change your shell to /bin/ksh and save the selection.

• Wait 10 minutes and then login to lxplus. You should be in a ksh environment (ATLAS does not support /bin/ksh; this is only for getting access.)
  • ssh lxplus.cern.ch
  • ps $$ afte login should say bin/ksh
  • If you are unable to login, wait another 10 minutes but no longer. If you are still unable to login, you will have to ask for SNOW help from CERN but restore your shell first.

• Do this carefully - this moves everything in your home dir to a doNotDelete dir and copies login scripts. Do not logout ! Do one of these:

# if you know which files are the issue, move only those ones
\cd 
\mkdir ~/doNotDelete
mv <culprits> ~/doNotDelete/
# if it is a .bash or .zsh file, copy a fresh one from /etc/skel/ to ~/
# do not exit !

# if you do not know the culprit, move everything
\cd 
\mkdir ~/doNotDelete
\mv * ~/doNotDelete/
\mv .* ~/doNotDelete/
\mv ~/doNotDelete/.globus ~/
\cp /etc/skel/.* ~/
# do not exit !

• Go to this web page (login if needed)
  • https://resources.web.cern.ch/resources/Manage/Linux/Settings.aspx
  • Restore your shell (to /bin/bash or /bin/zsh as before and save the selection

• Wait 10 minutes and then login to lxplus in a new terminal session.
  • ssh lxplus.cern.ch
  • Do this after login: ps $$ which should show you bash our zsh as your current shell to which you just changed. If not, wait longer and try again.

• If you are able to login, and to your bash or zsh shell, you are successful in regaining access !

• Now carefully move the files one at a time from ~/doNotDelete/ to your $HOME dir. Check each time that you are able to login. Do not forget the "hidden files" (ls -la ~/doNotDelete will show this) but do not overwrite your current .bash* or .zsh* login scripts. Add what you need one at a time in your .bash* or .zsh* files.

• Once you are complete, and can still successfully do a fresh ssh lxplus.cern.ch, you are done and you can exit from all your terminal ssh sessions.

• Bonus: you may want to look into passwordless access.