BTW, Kelli, this is strange enouth. Why you are only one who encountered such a problem?! I guess that many sites has setup similar to yours... (I wan't blame you, no, I just curious.) Can you please (if you have working lilo "linux single") comment out "auth required pam_pwdb.so ..." line (and change sufficient to required on ldap line) or insert "auth required pam_deny.so" before that pwdb line in your pam.d/login file and see how this will affect your problem? (Note that you probably can't login as root in this case -- I recall "linux single"). Or, try to stack 'em in reverse order -- sufficient pwdb first, and required ldap with use_first_pass second. The [pam_]pwdb has many assorted bugs (and pam_unix also)... :( I don't know the difference between plain login and telnetd+login in "pam" point of view. Or, there should be _no_ difference. And I started to think that strace can be useful also (But I'm not an "ldap guru", so I'll not understand all the details). Kelli, can you repost that strace? And aha, Ben Collins already "groked" that -- he said that this is sigsegv, and that was in the first thread (that I didn't read until now)! Regards, Michael.