Hi, I've made some stupid thing trying to install cPanel on my PC (just to try it out), I know this was really stupid . Finally it was installed BUT it didn't work, so I uninstalled it, but then i noticed i had 2 more shells in my /etc/shells file and that my /bin/su program was root:wheel owned AND the worst thing is that now I can't login as root using 'su'. Ive corrected the permissions and ownership, and also the /etc/shells file, but noting ...

Please anyone here can help me out?? THANKS!

What happens when you try to 'su' ?

If the su binary has been replaced or corrupted just reinstall the coreutils package from either the original CD or the updates branch of one of the fedora mirrors.

To see if su has been changed try rpm -V coreutils. If you get no output back then no changes have been made from the initial install. If you get a line like

Then it has changed. The possible output is something like SM?DLUGTC. Basically if you get a ? or 5 as the third charcater, the content or sum of the file is different from what was installed with the rpm.

To reinstall the package you may have to do something like rpm -ivh --replacepkgs coreutils.whatever.rpm to force rpm to reinstall an existing package.

Hope that helps.

PS - I notice that you say you can't log in with su. Does that mean that you cannot su to root when logged in as a normal user or you cannot log in as root ? If it's the second (and I don't know why a corrupted su binary would cause that) then you'd have to do the above from rescue mode. Remember to use the --root /mnt/sysimage on rpm if you don't chroot there first.

Hello spootk, thanks for your answer. I already replaced the 'su' binary with the one i have in the CDs, but NOTHING, the binary was not corrupted. What it happends is that when I login as a normal user then i cant switch to root and i always get a "incorrect password" error message(i use the correct passwd..., just in case), but root CAN switch to any user, thanks for you time!

If you can log in as root, but can't su to root, there are a couple things that you might want to look at:
1) Are you still a member of the wheel group.
2) Are members of the wheel group still allowed to su to root according to the /etc/sudoers file (edit using visudo).

While looking at the second, check whether the password was changed for sudo. Sometimes, it is the users own password.

The implementation of the the sudoers policy may be handled by PAM, and so that is something else that may of been altered.

Also check /var/log/messages and /var/log/secure after an su attempt to see if there are any errors.