"su" not requesting password
 

Slackware64 14 RC4

"su" is going straight to root without asking for a password. So far I've tested this in xterm, konsole, and virtual terminals. Is this a bug or have I done something silly? Trouble is, I can't remember what I've done recently that might have caused it.

You DID set a root password, right?

Aha, perhaps that's it. I upgraded as follows: 13.37 -> 14 RC1 -> 14 RC4

I had a user and a root password in 13.37, but perhaps only the user password is carried forward during an upgrade and the root password not? (I tend to do clean installs rather than upgrades so I haven't noticed this before.)

could you show your /etc/sudoers file?

Is sudo relevant to this question?

Nope, sorry ;-)

If there is no password entry for root in /etc/shadow I would just use the passwd command to set it.

The /etc package was updated on September 4, so if you don't have a shadow.new file in /etc, chances are you chose to overwrite the old one when asked...

Some programs can change the /etc/sudoers file, aading like string:
and then su and sudo do not ask the password. In a my country we have a mobile service provider "Megafon", which produces the program named "MobilePartner". On installing these program in /etc/sudoers will added entered line above.

I chose to overwrite and not had this problem.
I have no file shadow.new.

I use Slackware64 current multilib

Thanks one and all for the replies. My fault for not paying attention when upgrading. I do still find it strange, however, that my user password survived the upgrade while root's did not.

Maybe root's password got blanked just in case it went catastrophic. If you can't login a user, at least you could log in as root and reset password. I don't know though. Just a guess.

That is really weird. I have a machine with -current installed. Because of driver issues I reverted it back to 13.37 and later back to -current, but at no time any password was blanked. I assume that this is not a standard behavior.