I Received a Weird Error ... Tell Me What It Means

taurusx5 · 06-12-2008, 12:32 AM

The following is advice I got for establishing connection to my modem. I was told to change group ownership ttySHSF0 so that it is usable for users. The following is the code:

su
chown root:users /dev/ttySHSF0

However, I got this error: 'su: authentication failure'... Then, I tried and got this error:

x@xx:~$ chown root:users /dev/ttySHSF0
chown: changing ownership of `/dev/ttySHSF0': Operation not permitted

Why can't I log in as su? What should I do?

Uncle_Theodore · 06-12-2008, 12:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by taurusx5

The following is advice I got for establishing connection to my modem. I was told to change group ownership ttySHSF0 so that it is usable for users. The following is the code:

su
chown root:users /dev/ttySHSF0

However, I got this error: 'su: authentication failure'... Then, I tried and got this error:

x@xx:~$ chown root:users /dev/ttySHSF0
chown: changing ownership of `/dev/ttySHSF0': Operation not permitted

Why can't I log in as su? What should I do?

Probably, your user can't use the su command. AFAIK it has to be in the wheel group to do that. What system/distribution do you use?

taurusx5 · 06-12-2008, 09:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Uncle_Theodore

Probably, your user can't use the su command. AFAIK it has to be in the wheel group to do that. What system/distribution do you use?

Hi, uncle theodore. I use ubuntu 7.10. Please let me know what should be my next steps.