Hello all,

I just installed Gentoo and after that i came up with this problem:

login as root I have no problem.
login as user I have no problem.

su to user from root I have no problem.
su to root from user I have a password authentication problem:

su: Permission denied
Sorry.

My password is as simple as it gets, with no special characters.
I also read the previous thread about this problem and my etc/su file permitions are u+s.

I have PAM installed and its contents are:

#%PAM-1.0

auth required pam_env.so
auth sufficient pam_unix.so likeauth nullok
auth required pam_deny.so

account required pam_unix.so

password required pam_cracklib.so difok=2 minlen=8 dcredit=2 ocredit=2 retry=3
password sufficient pam_unix.so nullok md5 shadow use_authtok
password required pam_deny.so

session required pam_limits.so
session required pam_unix.so
/etc/pam.d/system-auth lines 1-14/14 (END)

Can anyone help me here? I am a newbie so any help would be really helpfull.

Thanks in advance

Joao Pinto

Is your user a part of the "wheel" group? To check run the command "groups" when you are logged in as the user to see the groups you are in. Then just run (I think): gpasswd -a wheel USERNAME.

Hopefully that helps.

From memory (of when I had gentoo installed), having the user in the wheel group just means that the user can issue the "su" command to change to root, surely it would be the other way round i.e. that root is also a member of the wheel group ??? because to "su" in root is attempting to su from root to root. Could that be why joaoPinto is being given the "permission denied" error ???

Or is it that joaoPinto is forgetting that when you are "su' ing" back from root to user, you would normally do su joaoPinto or whatever other username is used.

I may well be talking a load of bollocks. It's just that root has (or is supposed to have) overall control of the system. If the user wasn't in the wheel group, then the command su just responds with "command not known" (or it did when I last had gentoo installed).

So hence, I'm wondering if the command to switch back from root to user is being issued correctly as oppossed to just which from root, well the system wouldn't know where to "su" too because it's already in root.

a thousands thanks you's

tha problem was the wheel groups that needed to be in my users' list.

i did

usermod -G wheel username

as root and everything went fine.

Thanks you both, specially Centinul

J

A word of caution...using usermod -G makes the user a member of only the specified groups. If the user belonged to any other groups but you didn't include them then the user will no longer belong to them.

Next time use