Prepare for installation of Oracle 11g R2 on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 R2. First I logged in as root, then created a user named oracle (with its password). Next I tried to switch to user oracle:

#su - oracle

Supposedly I am now oracle user. But when I check the current user for the session, it is still the root, not oracle.

I tested:

echo $USER
or
last | grep $USER
or
env | grep -i user

They all returned: root

Why so?


Now start a new session, and login as oracle, the error message states:

xsession: login for oracle is disabled.

What was wrong here?



Thanks to help

Scott

Hi,

testing environment variables, is not really the way to go.
What do "whoami" and "id" (or "id -u") return?

Evo2.

Both "whoami" and "id" returned: root

Hi,

what procedure did you use to create that user?

Can you check the uid of the user "oracle". You should be able to do that with the following command:
Evo2.

what procedure did you use to create that user?

#/usr/sbin/useradd -u 502 -g oinstall -G dba oracle
#passwd oracle
...
...


#grep oracle /etc/passwd
oracle:x:104:107:Oracle user:/opt/oracle:/bin/false

How could I ended up with /bin/false?

Hi,

the /bin/false is the shell for the user oracle and that is why you cant log in (su - oracle) as that user. I'm not sure why that is the shell though. Normally if you don't specify the shell when using useradd the default shell which is set in /etc/default/useradd is used.

Is there any reason you used useradd instead of adduser? adduser is usually the better option (check the man pages of both commands).

Evo2.