Can't login after poweroff

[akontsevich]

Plasmashell turned off my PC on low UPS battery level. After this was unable to login with either user in Plasma(X11). In tty1 was able to login with root user only but it prints strange message: POWER FAILURE. Logging with a regular user fails with the message:

POWER FAILURE

Login incorrect

All the users are still present in /etc/passwd. su user also works fine. Tried to change user settings via console Yast - it is unable to save changes for the user for some reason. Also something strange happen with locale: Cyrillic character written by Latin ones in TTY1. 'What could be the problem? How to fix? Thanks!

[hui]

After a power failure, I cannot login

We had a power failure today. I discovered the UPS batteries are no longer battery-y, i.e., worn out. What little charge was left in the batteries was exhausted before power returned: hard reboot. After restarting, I can no longer login. Immediately the phrase “POWER FAILURE” appears, replaced by “Password authentication failed. Please try again”. That repeats itself 3 times before reverting to displaying available accounts. Anything entered in the Password entry box is ignored! I can boot to …

[akontsevich]

Thanks a lot, @hui, works again! Won’t run apcupsd any more.

[hendersj]

You don’t need to do that - instead, you can just configure it not to do that.

The reason it does it, though, is so you can’t log in and start programs while it’s trying to shut the system down because the battery’s low.

[akontsevich]

@hendersj

You don’t need to do that - instead, you can just configure it not to do that.

How? And how to start it on boot?

@hendersj

The reason it does it, though, is so you can’t log in and start programs while it’s trying to shut the system down because the battery’s low.

BTW, why do I may need apcupsd as plasmashell shuts down PC on battery low as well and does it more correctly?

[hendersj]

@akontsevich

@hendersj

You don’t need to do that - instead, you can just configure it not to do that.

How? And how to start it on boot?

I have two APC UPSes connected to my TW system - I followed (generally) the instructions at https://wiki.debian.org/apcupsd to configure the auto-startup.

Actually had to redo it recently, because the UPSes were connected to a RPi that, during our last power outage, wouldn’t boot (SD card gone bad it seems), so rather than using the net driver, I’m now using the USB driver for two instances of the daemon.

But either way, the setup is basically the same.

In the apcupsd.conf file, you can just point the NOLOGINDIR somewhere else to prevent it from creating that file in a place where the system would use it. There’s probably other ways to disable it as well, but that’s the easiest way I can see to do it.

@akontsevich

BTW, why do I may need apcupsd as plasmashell shuts down PC on battery low as well and does it more correctly?

I don’t run Plasma, so I don’t know anything about how Plasma’s power management works. Maybe someone else can jump in and answer that question. It may be that you don’t need it, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert on understanding why that might or might not be the case.