Cannot SSH... Really Frustrating!

Okay, this is the timeline of what happened:

1) Everything is fine. I can login as root and login to WHM as root.

2) I change the root password using the "change root password" tool in the WHM admin area.

3) I exit and login to WHM using my new password. Everything is great

4) I now cannot login to the server via SSH with the old or new root password!


Steps I have taken to try to fix this:

1) Tried old root password

2) Tried new root password

3) Changed my password (via WHM) back to the old password and tried to login

4) Changed my password (via WHM) to a new password and tried to login

How do I fix this problem!? I have not been able to SSH for a month and it is frustrating. I am running CentOS 4.x

Please give me some ideas on how to fix this

 

I can check the server logs because I have root access to the file system via WHM (I have a plugin installed that lets me do this).

I just need to know, where are the logs I need to check?

 

/var/log/secure just contains a whole bunch of these lines:

Code:

May 21 01:02:28 server1 xinetd[4832]: START: imap pid=22511 from=127.0.0.1
May 21 01:10:50 server1 xinetd[4832]: START: imap pid=22789 from=127.0.0.1
May 21 01:19:12 server1 xinetd[4832]: START: imap pid=22875 from=127.0.0.1

 

Given that I have root file access, is there any way to change my password? For example, is there a perl script I could make and execute as root that would change the password for me?

 

Nothing in /var/log/messages says anything that seems suspect


The only thing related root is lines like this:

May 21 03:30:01 server1 crond(pam_unix)[28153]: session closed for user root

And then this

May 21 03:33:07 server1 pure-ftpd: (?@127.0.0.1) [INFO] New connection from 127.0.0.1
May 21 03:33:07 server1 pure-ftpd: (?@127.0.0.1) [INFO] Logout.
May 21 03:33:10 server1 crond(pam_unix)[28386]: session closed for user parahost