Cannot login to su

Totally new here. Just last night installed Mandrake 8.2, non-GUI on my PII/350Mhz box. I want to learn Linux from the ground up and eventually turn this box into my main home network gateway running firewall, nameserver, proxy, httpd, and ftpd services and forward IP requests to an internal (ahem) MS IIS server for self development.

The problem(s):

1. Following our installation last night everything worked great. You could not directly log in using root but you could login as a regular user and then use the su command to use the root password. Is this a normal restriction?

2. Now all of a sudden I cannot use su. It tells me the same password I have been using all along is incorrect. The funny thing is that I can enter the machine from another computer on the internal network using WebMin and do anything to the system I please. I have even used it to successfully change the root password but it doesn't change the behavior I spoke of above.

Is there anything I can reset or something to get this working correctly again?

Thanks . . .

hmmm, su is giving you a headache? See if you have this situtation
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/solrhe/Secur...hap5sec43.html

Thank you neo77777.

Not exactly sure I understand the full concept yet but what I ended up doing after visiting the link was adding my user to the wheel group. This enabled the user to use su.

I still don't understand why I cannot login to the machine directly under the root account.

Again, thanks.

You've choosen high security level. If it's Mandrake, change it and you'd be able to log in as root.

OK, thanks. Actually I just wanted to understand and make sure it wasn't something I did wrong during installation. I'll leave it this way and learn to work with this.

To see what the effect would be I raised my Mandrake Security level from "Normal" to "High". Now I can't login as root. I get "password is incorrect". I can't SU in a terminal, as I get the same "password is incorrect" message. I have one other user account assigned to group USER only. How can I lower the security level to regain access as root?

Rob

You might be able to do a little hack-around. Boot off a Linux CD (linux rescue style) and then mount your root partition. Edit the "/etc/group" file on that partition and change the user to the "wheel" group. Then un-mount the root partition and reboot (not to the CD). Forgive me if this doesn't work, I don't use Mandy yet. Still working on RH, Gentoo, and Solaris.

I have the system booted in to rescue mode and mounted the file system. how do I edit the group file in /etc?

ps-I found VI by searching google groups but can't figure what the groups file content is "root::0:root" is all thats in it.

9pm - nevermind - i quit. I'm reformatting and reinstalling.

A little impatient? 8:47 reply, then a 9:10 "I give up". Come on, I stepped out for a coffee break.

I am curious now if you actually had another user though. You say the only entry in the groups file was for root? If you had another user, then you should have seen an entry for "users" or a group matching the user accounts name as well.

Anyway, you would've needed to get the numeric value of the wheel group and then modified the entry for the user in the passwd file. But I would have to boot up my linux box to recall which field is the group. I think it's the 3rd field, but I may be wrong.

There were other ways as well, for instance, you could have chrooted to your / partition, then added a user, with wheel as the group. That's one of the fun parts of linux, is finding all the ways that you can do the same thing.

Good luck on the rebuild, never hurts if you can spare the time and won't loose data.