Can anyone tell me why, and how to fix something please.. Everytime I try to login to SSH with any account OTHER than root, I get the error
fork failed: Resource temporary unavailable. Yet, with root, it logs in fine.. Please help. Thanks so much.

Could be a runaway script or a fork bomb that's eating up the process table space. Run ps -ax as root to see if there's a process that's replicating itself ad infinitum or run top to check resource usage. If it's a replicated process, don't waste your time killing PID's as they'll just pop back up. A simple reboot may cure the problem.

There's a good thread about fork bombs here: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=46195

Originally posted by alchiba
If it's a replicated process, don't waste your time killing PID's as they'll just pop back up.


That's what killall is for. Well, killall and rmuser.

k, thanks.

It is also a possibility that you set your limits too low, so that the system is unable to fork the shell. Try raising the limits. Your root account is accessible because limits only works with non root users.

Thank you priyadi! That's what it was. Very helpful.