can't su as user

Jason jkenner@mindspring.com
Fri, 24 Nov 2000 00:17:36 -0700


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__
I Support Linux:           _> _  _ |_  _  _     _|
Working Together To       <__(_||_)| )| `(_|(_)(_|
To Build A Better Future.       |                   <s>