I have WHM hosted on a virtual-dedicated Linux Enterprise Centos 5 server hosted at iWeb.
Now and then my root password will stop working. I will get a red message saying: "The login is invalid."
The problem is that I know I have the right password. I can login via ssh and change the root password using "scripts/chpass root newpassword" and that won't solve the problem.
I suspected it might have to do with cpHulk brute force protection. So, again via SSH, I reset the brutes and logins MySQL tables. This does not solve the problem.
The ONLY way I found to solve the problem is to "re-initialize the smart layer" on my virtual-dedicated server.