Hello friends,

I'm using RHEL 5, the problem I'm facing is that the su command doesn't work. If I logged in as root user I can switch to other user as it doesn't requires password but when I try to revert back to root account it gives me error "su : incorrect password ". Similarly I'm unable to switch from one user account to another.

I've tried some steps mentioned on other forums but none of them worked for me, like setting permission of on su command, password -u command to unlock accounts etc.

Someone recommended to change /etc/pam.d/su and /etc/pam.d/sshd but being newbie I don't know how to change them, the contents of these file are:

/etc/pam.d/su:
auth sufficient pam_rootok.so
# Uncomment the following line to implicitly trust users in the "wheel" group.
#auth sufficient pam_wheel.so trust use_uid
# Uncomment the following line to require a user to be in the "wheel" group.
#auth required pam_wheel.so use_uid
auth include system-auth
account sufficient pam_succeed_if.so uid = 0 use_uid quiet
account include system-auth
password include system-auth
session include system-auth
session optional pam_xauth.so

/etc/pam.d/sshd:
auth include system-auth
account required pam_nologin.so
account include system-auth
password include system-auth
session optional pam_keyinit.so force revoke
session include system-auth
session required pam_loginuid.so

Please help.

Regards

You've posted this in the kernel forum - which is wrong. Newbie might be best.

What does 'ls -l su' show?
What does 'rpm -Va' show?
What does 'pwck' show?

Sorry, actually I was searching same kind of question and the last one I saw on this forum, so I also posted my question on here :-s

-rwxrwxrwx 1 777 root 28336 Oct 31 2008 /bin/su

rpm -Va lists so many lines can't put here :-s

user adm: directory /var/adm does not exist
user news: directory /etc/news does not exist
user uucp: directory /var/spool/uucp does not exist
user gopher: directory /var/gopher does not exist
user pcap: directory /var/arpwatch does not exist
user avahi-autoipd: directory /var/lib/avahi-autoipd does not exist
user sabayon: directory /home/sabayon does not exist
pwck: no changes

Regards

That mode is wrong - it looks as if your host has had a bit of a disaster. I suggest resetting modes to the RPM database values:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/reset-...ermission.html
as a short-term fix and after that you can think about whether you want to reinstall.

i guess /bin/su is provided by coreutils-* package.
Use to get the package name which provides /bin/su.

You can use --setperms to reset the permissions(of the file) back to normal..As suggested by linosaurusroot
i.e<package-name> = the output you got from the "yum provides /bin/su".

if it lists more than one package.. you should use the latest one.