pop authentication via pam fails for some systems not others

1. Need help with PAM: FAILED LOGIN ... Authentication failed

Hi,

I can't login into my linux anymore. When I enter a username at the
login prompt, 3 more login prompts quickly flash by, the screen clears
and I get the RedHat greeting followed by the login prompt again. Don't
even get a chance to enter a password.

Here's how I got to have the problem:

I upgraded XFree86 to 3.3.1. In so doing I upgraded pam to pam-0.57 and
pamconfig to something. However, I did -not- upgrade util-linux. Then I
read in this NG somewhere that I should upgrade util-linux to get a
newer /bin/login that uses the pam-0.57 package. So I managed to get the
/bin/login pgm from the util-linux-2_5-38_i386.rpm package and copy it
to /bin on my troubled machine.

Now I get the above mentioned behaviour. When I boot linux from floppy
and cat the /var/log/secure file I see:

FAILED LOGIN <stuff> FROM root <stuff> : Authentication failed.

followed by a few:

FAILED LOGIN <stuff> FROM [NULL] <stuff> : Authentication failed.

Any help would be appreciated...

thanks, Zoran.

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