[CentOS] Can only login as root

Thu May 3 17:37:25 UTC 2012
Joseph Spenner <joseph85750 at yahoo.com>



________________________________
 From: Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net>
To: centos at centos.org 
Sent: Thursday, May 3, 2012 5:47 AM
Subject: [CentOS] Can only login as root
 
> I have a strange problem on a CentOS-5.8 machine.
> I can only login as root.
> If I try to login with one of the user's names,
> it hangs for a long time.
> I thought it hung forever, but I just found that
> I do login after "su tim" after 5 minutes.
>
> It seems that the problem lies in repeated messages in /var/log/messages
> ---------------------------
> May  3 12:14:13 helen su: nss_ldap: failed to bind to LDAP server 
> ldap://www.gayleard.com/: Can't contact LDAP server
> May  3 12:14:13 helen su: nss_ldap: reconnecting to LDAP server 
>  (sleeping 64 seconds)...
> ---------------------------

=====================

How does your /etc/nsswitch.conf look?  Particularly the 'passwd:' line?