Hello. I'm working over a remote terminal in a server 20 KM from where I am, using telnet. It has installed Fedora Core 4.

I'd make some stupids mistakes. I force rpm to upgrade some libraries, as libselinux, libacl, libattr, libgcc and libstdc++.
The result: 'su' is not working. Whenever I type
su
I get
It doesn't even prompt for the password!
sus doesn't work with other options neither, like -l, etc.

Well, I said, let's try 'login'. But login tells me that my root password is incorrect.
I tried to login as the same user I'm using, and I get
The curious thing is that whener I try to connect to the remote server, the initial login for my normal user works fine, but for root, it tells my that the password is incorrect.

So, I decided to travel the 20 KM to see what's happening. I rebooted the system, the initial screen ask for my user and password, I used my root user and my root password, and it worked perfectly (more less)!!!

So, the problem is:
when I'm physically in front of the computer, and reboot the machine, I can do the first login as root without problem (i didn't try to use 'su' or 'login' in this situation).
when I'm trying to remote access through telnet, I can do the first login as a normal user, but not as root. And, I neither can use the 'login' or 'su' commands

Any ideas? is there any other command to login as root besides "su" or "login"? What command uses the initial login screen?

Now i'm not in front of the server (i'm again 20 km away)

Thank you very much, sorry for my english

I had also force to upgrade coreutils
I'm an idiot

You can look into sudo. You'll have to set yourself up in the sudoers file.... which I guess will require root access...... Dang. Sorry.

try
this should for you to put in a password as it gives you full administrative power.