This account is currently not available

If you get this message attempting to ssh in or su’ing as another user, there is no valid shell set for this user.

You can quickly inspect this by looking at the /etc/passwd file.

Check for an entry that has something like ‘/bin/false’ or ‘/bin/nologin’ for the shell:

userdude:x:111:113::/home/userdude:/bin/false

or

userdude:x:111:113::/home/userdude:/bin/nologin

or

userdude:x:111:113::/home/userdude:/usr/sbin/nologin

How to fix

To fix this, give the user a valid shell like bash (/bin/bash)

The command chsh can be used to change a shell for a user. This changes the shell to bash:

$ sudo chsh -s /bin/bash username

To see a list of available shells on your machine, check out the file /etc/shells:

$ cat /etc/shells
# /etc/shells: valid login shells
/bin/csh
/bin/sh
/usr/bin/es
/usr/bin/ksh
/bin/ksh
/usr/bin/rc
/usr/bin/tcsh
/bin/tcsh
/usr/bin/esh
/bin/dash
/bin/bash
/bin/rbash
/usr/bin/screen
/bin/zsh
/usr/bin/zsh

Cool!