[mdlug] su Password problem

[Raymond McLaughlin]

Drew wrote:
>      The 'su root' command, and the 'Terminal Program - Super User 
> Mode' application in the Terminals submenu,
> have spontaniously stopped accepting my root password. Yast still 
> accepts it, as does Administrator Mode in
> Personal Preferences; and I can also log in as root from the Login 
> screen. (I get a background wallpaper of
> bombs and exclamation points.) But su returns "Wrong password".
> 
>      Why the different behavior for su? And why *did* su and the 
> Super User Terminal app previously accept
> my password?
> 
>      This is Suse 11.0, running KDE 3.5, Kernel 2.6.25.5-1.1-pae.
> 
> ----
> 
>    - Drew.

I'm not sure why you use 'su root' instead of just 'su'. I go for less
typing myself, but it shouldn't matter. Since you can log in as root why
don't you do that, and then open a terminal. I this terminal try the
following:
    #grep root /etc/passwd
    #grep root /etc/shadow
Make sure there are no duplicate entries goofing things up. There should
be on, and only one root entry in each file. Then:
    # su - <someuser>
Root can su to any user without password authentication. once you have
done this try:
    someuser$ su -
and test su'ing to root from there. If it works then there is no
problem. If not, then exit the "some user" prompt, and as root,:
   # pwd
change your root password. For these testing purposes you can change it
to something easy to type. (Don't forget to change it later when this is
fixed.) Now, with the easy to type password, try the above tests again.
If su still fails then maybe the su program really is screwed up.

At this point I would try the admittedly "windows-ish" hack of just
reinstalling the su program. su is part of the gnu core utilities so you
should mount you original OpenSuSE DVD and do:
# rpm -ivh --nodeps --force cdrom/suse/i586/coreutils-6.11-9.1.i586.rpm
(adjust for your mount point, and if you're running 64 bit) and then
test as above.

If this doesn't get it I would look more into that /etc/pam.d/su thing
Greg was talking about.

Raymond McLaughlin