I'm having trouble using su. I'm using LFS 6.0. I'm pretty sure I installed PAM and shadow from BLFS. I can login at init 3 as root just fine, and sudo works OK (I have set up sudoers to allow me to use sudo without a password). However, when I try to "su" or "su -" or "su - root" (from a terminal in Xorg), I get a response of :

su: Authentication failure
Sorry.

Since sudo works OK, this isn't that big of a deal, but, I just want to know why my system isn't working as it should. And, sometimes I'd like to just login as root one time to do a whole bunch of things without typing sudo in front of every command...

Any thoughts?

TIA

In Gentoo, I know that users are required to belong to the 'wheel' group in order to use su. Perhaps there is something similar that you need.

~Dan

This question was posted in "Linux From Scratch". LFS does not use a wheel group.

Anyone have an answer on topic???

TIA

su: Authentication failure is probably a PAM issue.

look in /etc/pam.d/* and make sure all of the files are there that have been specified by LFS-6.0 and they are all properly configured.

If you didn't install pam (which is in the blfs project) then try looking at the flags ll /bin/su does it look something like rwsr xr x?

Thanks!, Yerp.

Su was flagged as rwxr-xr-x

All I had to do was chmod +s on /bin/su and it works now. However, my su now is flagged rwsr-sr-x. Is that OK?

Woo-hoo!

No sh1t this is in the LFS section. Just trying to be helpful you SOB. No one had responded to your question and I offered a solution I know works in another distro. You could have just said "Thanks, but that's not the case under LFS." Freakin' jerk offs like you piss the sh1t out of me.

i have the same error on my gentoo and now it 's work thanks
alot