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root password no longer works when loggesd in as user

Well I guess I did something stupid because my root password no longer works when I try to su. I have no idea what is causing this, but I will explain what I did when it started happening.

1. I deleted all the files in /tmp (didn't relaize I needed some of those)
2. When I rebooted and tried to log into my user account (I'm in run level 4) KDE would start to load but then suddenly go back to login prompt
3. I popped over to the console on tty6 to check out the .xseession-errors and it was complaining about some of the /tmp files not being owned by root (the one I deleted not realizing it was important, I think it was .ICE-unix)
4. These files must have been recreated, but were owned by my user, so I did this: 'chown -R root.root /tmp .*' but then quickly aborted realizing that '../' might be included which would not be good.
5. rebooted again. Now I can log in as user, but my root password does not work when I 'su'. My root password will work if I switch to tty6 and log in as root, so I don't think it's a problem with the password files.

Contents of new ~/.xsession-errors for user:

Code:

stderr is not a tty - where are you?

xset:  bad font path element (#68), possible causes are:

    Directory does not exist or has wrong permissions

    Directory missing fonts.dir

    Incorrect font server address or syntax

xset:  bad font path element (#68), possible causes are:

    Directory does not exist or has wrong permissions

    Directory missing fonts.dir

    Incorrect font server address or syntax

startkde: Starting up...

kbuildsycoca running...

Code:

drkstr@dsk:~$ ls -al /tmp

total 36

drwxrwxrwt  8 root  root  4096 2006-07-21 18:32 ./

drwxr-xr-x  18 root  root  4096 2006-07-15 15:51 ../

drwxrwxrwt  2 root  root  4096 2006-07-21 18:32 .ICE-unix/

-r--r--r--  1 root  root    11 2006-07-21 18:32 .X0-lock

drwxrwxrwt  2 root  root  4096 2006-07-21 18:32 .X11-unix/

drwx------  2 root  root  4096 2006-07-21 18:20 kde-drkstr7NUopt/

drwx------  2 drkstr users 4096 2006-07-21 18:32 kde-drkstroWPpXg/

drwx------  2 root  root  4096 2006-07-21 18:20 ksocket-drkstr6Qln2b/

drwx------  2 drkstr users 4096 2006-07-21 18:32 ksocket-drkstrBaUhXe/

Any ideas what I broke, and how to unbroke it?

Also, is there a way to stop KDE (or X11 maybe?) from depending on files in the /tmp directory?

Thanks in advance!
...drkstr

I don't know what you broke, but try running
strace -o debug su
and look at the file debug afterwards. Should give you
an indication as to what's going on.

CHeers,
Tink

<sigh>

This is what I was afraid of. There are a bunch of permission denied errors which means I probably didn't kill me ill-executed chown command in time. I probably changed the group ownership to some necessary files. This is my guess at least, I think I'm still a little to new to Linux to understand debug info compleatly.

Code:

drkstr@dsk:~$ cat debug | grep "Permission denied"

readlink("/proc/self/fd/0", 0x805aa98, 4095) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)

readlink("/proc/self/fd/0", 0xafcc601c, 511) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)

open("/var/run/utmp", O_RDWR)          = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)

open("/etc/shadow", O_RDONLY)          = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)

open("/etc/shadow", O_RDONLY)          = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)

I will reinstall the a/ packages and hopefully this will resolve the problem.

Thanks Tink!
...drkstr

'upgradepkg --reinstall *.tgz' from within the a/ directory did the trick (also remembered to copy my custom kernel back over).

I need to be more careful with .* in the future. Good thing there is a failsafe with 'rm .*' Or I would be in a world of hurt! ;)

Thanks again for the strace command, I need to learn more about this to use it more effectively in the future.

...drkstr

You're welcome mate, and glad the fix was easy enough.

Cheers,
Tink