Can't login on terminal Ubuntu 20.04 (glibc related?)

mauricev

1/30/24, 6:00 PM

I can't login anymore neither on an Ubuntu 20.04 terminal nor by graphical login. The screen casts a pretty regular message and within a fraction of a second logs me out again.

The last activity I've done was the creation of a Docker image based on Ubuntu 22.04. I copied some libs from the container's /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu to a directory in my /home. I carefully avoided touching libc.so (GLIBC), because messing with that caused me great trouble a few years back. Nevertheless the last time I logged in there was a message about libc.so.(version nr) 'missing' (I don't remember the exact line) and it didn't login. After that event the PC does not log me in at all, not even specifying why.

In addition I appended some paths to $LD_LIBRARY_PATH (not $PATH!), but I don't think that's the problem.

I tried using a USB live stick, but that does not give me access to the relevant places (/home /etc).

0 + 3

glibc

20.04

steeldriver

1/30/24, 6:53 PM

How/where did you append paths to LD_LIBRARY_PATH? Did those paths include the location where you copied libraries from the container?

mauricev

1/30/24, 9:15 PM

@steeldriver yes, I did, by editing /etc/environment. I did that before and it was no problem. The ld_library_path already included a directory to Ub20.04 libs. They were used as shared libraries for code that was build in Ub20.04-based containers. A bit redundant, since my host was also 20.04. But I upgraded the docker images to Ub22.04 this week (not the host!) and appended a folder with Ub22.04 libs to the end of the LD_LIBARY_PATH. It concerns libs like limysqlclient, libz, libssl, libzstd, libcrypto (and a few more), but not libc. Still, I am afraid that that one is part of the problem.

mauricev

1/31/24, 8:52 AM

@steeldriver Your question put me on the right course. I reverted the change in LD_LIBRARY_PATH in recovery mode and it works again. Conclusion: having multiple versions of shared libs in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH is bad practice.

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