bash login shell randomly broken

[dave_rodgman]

I've experienced very odd behaviour with the login shell:

Initially I had bash installed and no tcsh. Randomly, gnome-terminal locked up. New terminals wouldn't start (xterm or gnome-terminal). I couldn't log in in text-mode because (IIRC) of some error message about tcsh not being present (note: my shell in /etc/passwd is /bin/bash, which is present).

I managed to install tcsh, at which point all my login shells were tcsh, despite my setting in /etc/passwd. typing "bash" launched bash fine.

I then uninstalled tcsh. Now I get a bash login shell, and everything seems OK.

This happened randomly while I was using X, without changing any settings or updating packages.

The only possible clue is that I have a network login, so my /etc/password looks like:

+drodgman::::::/bin/bash

but:

sudo chsh -s /bin/bash drodgman
chsh: drodgman not found in /etc/passwd

maybe some problem with parsing network logins?

----------

Happened again today. I rebooted, and noticed that I was unable to bind to NIS. I was able to log in, though,
and I don't see any other problems (network filesystems mounted OK), so it's not clear why this problem has
affected my shell.

[Fabio Marconi (fabiomarconi)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.
Is this bug reproducible with the latest Lucid packages ?
Thanks in advance.

[Fabio Marconi (fabiomarconi)]

 Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage .

When reporting bugs in the future please use apport by using 'ubuntu-bug' and the name of the package affected. You can learn more about this functionality at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs.

[Fabio Marconi (fabiomarconi)]

We'd like to figure out what's causing this bug for you, but we haven't heard back from you in a while. Could you please provide the requested information? Thanks!

[Fabio Marconi (fabiomarconi)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!