set UID/su not working?
 

Caution: :newbie:

Well, it would appear that I'm a hopeless newbie because I simply don't understand what's going wrong here:

First strange thing is i cannot seem to su to root while I'm logged in as another user. 'su' asks me for the password but claims it to be invalid after I enter it. Same with 'su root'. I remember having used this to gain root privileges without any problem on another machine! What am I missing?

Second thing seems to be related to the first. I have to set UID a program (namely aterm) to be able to start it as another user. So I did a chmod 7755 aterm, which changed the permissions to
-rwsr-sr-x 1 root root
According to my knowledge this should give any user who starts the program root privileges, in effect allowing every user to start it. However when I try to launch it as another user, it still tells me that it "has to be installed suid root".

These two features are essential as I cannot use my system effectively as another user than root without them (and I'm sure everyone is gonna tell the whole story again about how bad this is :D).

Is my root account somehow broken? Or is it something else? I'm left completely without a clue...


Thanks for any feedback!

LoL
 

Alright, I finally got those two to cooperate. The problem was I had permission settings in YaST2 set to paranoid (highest setting) which seems to have denied me access to both. I have now set it to moderate and it works.

Now my question is: What does YaST2 do behind the scenes that disables both su and set UID/GID? Always good to know what's going on... and that's not too easy with YaST2 hanging around... :rolleyes:


Good Bye!