su permissions messed up

ceph · 09-08-2004, 10:51 PM

I'm running gentoo on an i686.

after install I enabled the wheel group, chown the su command (chown root:wheel su) made sure the group had execute and read permissions and added myself to the wheel group.

everytime I try to su it tells me authentication failed. I made a new user, added it to wheel, and got the same error. I checked the permissions for su several times, even allowed rwx for ugo, but got the same error.

Could I copy the su file from another machine?

thanks,
ryan

CroMagnon · 09-08-2004, 11:54 PM

When you changed the group on /bin/su, you likely lost the SUID bit and now su can't get the permissions it needs. Try this as root:

chmod 4750 /bin/su