Ok, the problem is that I can't su to root from a non-root userid nor can I login via ssh and most likely any other network service. I can however login as root from the machine's terminal.

This is in fact, a result of something I did. I accidently executed:

# chown -R apache.apache /*

instead of

# chown -R apache.apache ./*

whiles in the /var/www/html/something/ directory. I was installing some php CMS and was changing the perms (obviously).

I caught this about 20-30 seconds into the command execution and stopped it. I then executed:

# find / -uid 48 -gid 48 > /tmp/list

# for each in $(cat /tmp/list.tmp); do chown root.root $each; done

48 being apache's uid/gid. Now as I can only imagine, I have blown away ownership for something rather important.

The only clue I have as to what could be causing my problem is that maybe the sticky bit isn't set on /bin/su? Granted, this is a Fedors Core 3 box so I'm thinking that the sticky bit isn't used for this anymore. I don't really know. Might be more of a PAM issue?

Regardless, any help you have to offer would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not sure if this is chown -R everything back to root:root, and then repair other permissions like /home as necessary. I had a friend who did this, and he couldn't find everything and simply reinstalled.

that is a worry of mine...

I reinstalled the following rpms to resolve this:

A.

pam-0.77-65.i386.rpm
pam_ccreds-1-3.i386.rpm
pam-devel-0.77-65.i386.rpm
pam_krb5-2.1.2-1.i386.rpm
pam_passwdqc-0.7.5-2.i386.rpm
pam_smb-1.1.7-5.i386.rpm
passwd-0.68-10.i386.rpm

B.

coreutils-5.2.1-31.i386.rpm
cracklib-2.7-28.i386.rpm
shadow-utils-4.0.3-37.i386.rpm

Granted, the problem didn't go away until I reinstalled the rpms from group B so the ones listed in A were most likely not needed.