System is booting up. See pam nologin(8)

Posted on May 29, 2017 by Andreas Dafert System is booting up. See pam_nologin(8)

red hat 7 vm running pam-1.1.8-18.el7.x86_64 login over ssh was not possible and resulted in the following error message:

ssh login: System is booting up. See pam_nologin(8)

man pam_nologin shows:

pam_nologin is a PAM module that prevents users from logging into the system when /var/run/nologin or /etc/nologin exists.

so I checked for /etc/nologin and /var/run/nologin – last one existed – deleted – login possible

note: the login for user root still works

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