can't su as user

Bucky Goldstein wrote:
>
> Jason wrote:
> >
> > Bucky Goldstein wrote:
> [snip]
> > > Does anybody know how I can get su to work?
> >
> > What su are you using???
>
> Fascinating story really, thanks for your quick reply.
>
> Apparently su is a part of binutils and this was a upgrade that I
> installed. The developers are now telling me that something is wrong
> with su. So I found my answer about that.

I did notice at one point that for unknown reasons, su completely
failed to prompt for the root password, despite being on a machine
that was cleanly installed. I am not sure what the exact cause of this
was, but am fairly sure it was either an incompatibility with a newer
kernel or an incompatibility with the fact that the machine was
pulling its entire /usr directory over NFS from another machine. The
other machine had *matching* /lib, /sbin, and /bin, but who knows...

> I just tried to set up a wheel account to see if it would work and it
> didn't. I'm sure it's because of this GNU philosophy and that's fine
> with me.

sudo may be cooler anyways, since it allows the user to use their own
password for rootlike privs, while being able to limit the commands
they can run.

-- 
jkenner @ mindspring . com__
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