Hello dear friends of linux

I am neither a newbie nor an expert. I am administering a debian webserver (lenny) and run into a strange problem respectively new behaviour.

I login as root by ssh and want to change to another user so that I could run a program with the privileges and limitations of that user. So I used to do su <username> for this or login <username>. Now I still can do that for all users I tried but one. If I login as user openerp (which successfully starts daemons in the init process) I can authenticate myself if I go with "login openerp" or I get no failure message if I type "su openerp" (as root) but I am still root!

No hints in syslog.

by using login, this is what I get:

root@xxxxx:/var/log# login openerp
Password:
Last login: Sat Jul 24 23:40:31 CEST 2010 from xxxxxxxx on pts/0
Linux xxx.xxx.xx 2.6.33.3-atom32-11052010-1 #2 SMP Tue May 11 11:35:00 UTC 2010 i686

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
No directory, logging in with HOME=/
root@atom018:/var/log#

root@atom018:/var/log# whoami
root

It used to work, i.e. change user to openerp before, same with su openerp.

Any ideas to solve this issues are appreciated.


Sorry, just solved, solution: add /bin/bash instead of /bin/false to /etc/passwd

Please do not do that as allowing root to log in over the network is a security risk. Instead log in as unprivileged user and start applications as another unprivileged user using Sudo.


Be aware that there may be reasons for the application to require the unprivileged user "openerp" to have an inert shell.