I'm new to Linux so forgive me if this is easy.

An end-user brought me a CentOS 7 machine today that had been used by one of his contractors. Apparently, no user but root can login to the GUI. Regular users cannot. After entering the users' password, the system grinds for a few seconds, then simply returns to the login prompt. I logged in as root and created a new user and the same thing happens. No one but root can login. I looked in "messages" and /var/log but nothing is jumping out at me as to why this is happening.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

Thank you for any information you can provide.

Welcome to LQ!

Login as root and check the permissions on /home/ with
and
and post the results here.

Erm, that may not "help" since new users have the same issue...
Curious, but I don't have an immediate clue, or answer.

Does /var/log/secure show anything obvious?

Can users login from the console?

Can you log in on a TTY as a regular user? Use Ctrl+Alt+F2 to switch to it. You can use Ctrl+Alt+F1 to switch back to X.

I will check those when I get to work tomorrow a.m. and post the results. Thank you for your suggestions.

We'll be here and your users aren't going anywhere?

Seems like a troll changed your default runlevel to number 1 or single.

go do systemctl get-default

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