Note: I have a work around for now thanks to Anthony Iliopoulos, his suggestion was to disable systemd from pam: --- /etc/pam.d/common-session-pc.old 2020-03-25 13:42:38.404526416 +0100 +++ /etc/pam.d/common-session-pc 2020-03-25 13:42:47.308353223 +0100 @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ # at the start and end of sessions of *any* kind (both interactive and # non-interactive # -session optional pam_systemd.so debug +#session optional pam_systemd.so debug session required pam_limits.so session required pam_unix.so try_first_pass session optional pam_umask.so I'll also note that this issue is *still* present if you don't do the above, but just disable NIS. I disabled NIS by commenting out /etc/yp.conf and stopping ypserv.service and then disabling it. The only effective way to work around this is disabling pam_Systemd.so from pam from commom-session-pc as noted above. But without a system to reproduce, we have no way of debugging it further. Thomas, I'll leave chivo with the pam_systemd.so enabled, but I'll disable it on tuctuc. I'll keep using tuctuc for development, feel free to use chivo for any further testing / debugging.