Hi everyone,

I'm new to this forum and Linux. I'm using Suse Linux OS. It worked fine as if it's always but this morning I left my computer on and went off somewhere. When I got back and run "su" command then I found out that it's not working anymore even though I supplied the right password. I found a similar post here in this forum. I've tried that solution too though it's still not working. I changed /bin/su permission to 777 and I also checked /etc/passwd and also /etc/group , both of them are in readable format too. If I wanna be root I need to reboot and log in as root again and this is the only way I can be root at this moment and it's very inefficient. Please help me out of this.

Thanks all in advance.

P.S The error message is "su: cannot set groups: Operation not permitted", it appears whenever I run su.

777 are the wrong permissions for su, they should either be 04750 or 04755, the first is if you want to do a group wheel kind of thing and restrict access to su via a group.

hi estabroo,

When that problem happened, I didn't know what to do and changed that permission to 777. . Thought it might have to do something with the group permission. Just now I've changed back to 755 but the same problem is occurring. I still can't use su. I've no idea what's happened to this. I didn't install any software nor changed any settings. Any idea that would lead to solve this problem would be very much appreciated. Thanks all.

your missing the 4

04755

the 4 is the setuid bit, its what allows su to assume root privileges, su also needs to be owned by root.

Omg ! Thanks estabroo. a "4" makes difference . It's solved. I think I might need to read through changing file permission part in my Linux tutorial.