Re: su does not recognized root password

[Philip Rowlands]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2005, Tony Guo wrote:

>after I tried a few commands to change to different versions of shells
>available (sh, csh, ksh, etc.) with my fedora core 2 installation, and
>have a few su-ed windows open, I suddenly found the su command does not
>work any more, neither was my root password recognized.

A potentially confusing situation can arise when su loses its SUID
magic. Please check that the permissions on your "su" binary look like
this:

$ ls -l /bin/su
-rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 52770 Oct  5 08:50 /bin/su

Listfolk; is there a reason why su doesn't check for "root"-iness before
jumping into the password prompt or PAM routines? By comparing EUID vs
UID or somesuch?


Cheers,
Phil