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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011014 Description of problem: Cannot su after updating pam 0.75-14 to pam 0.75-16. Had to reinstall os and update everything except pam 0.75-14 in order to have access to files as superuser Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.update pam 0.75-14 to pam 0.75-16 2. 3. Actual Results: Lost ability to su Expected Results: This update is supposed to fix this type of problem with systems using passwords of 8 or more characters. Instead it produced this problem on my system. Additional info:
I did not have a problem as root, only when logged in as user and su to root. Also same GUI problem as bug 55661 report, but also was unable to have root privliges to rewrite files after su.
Which authentication systems are configured on this machine? Are you using md5 passwords? Shadow passwords? NIS? Is root's entry in /etc/passwd (or /etc/shadow, if using shadow) hashed with an md5 crypt (if it is, the second field will start with "$1$") or with a conventional crypt (if it is, it'll be exactly 13 characters long, and should contain only characters from the set "A-Za-z0-9")?
I have the same problem, as part of larger authentication problems I encountered after upgrading to pam-0.75-20 (first - 0.75-19 from 7.2 updates) for user account, plain su does not switch to root ( password is accepted, but permissions are not granted). su -l root works all right. Bsed on your description, I have shadow, MD5 encrypted passwords, no NIS. My password is 9 characters long, mixture of alphabethical and numerals and '_'. I use 2.4.16-0.13 kernel and glibc libraries on top of RH7.2 installation. My large problem is that after I upgraded pam (already with new kernel and glibc), I cannot login through gdm neither to root, nor to user account. My user password is 8 characters, mixture of lower and upper case alphabethical. Session is getting setup and immediately exits. I run gdm with debug unabled - nothing suspicious - gdm sets cookie to .Xauthority, runs /etc/X11/gdm/Init/Default and session immediately exits after that (it does not matter what desktop I choose). It has to do with authentication, since I can run plain startx or xdm all right - I'm getting Gnome desktop. However, I'm unable to open any terminals then - any of them (gnome-terminal, rxvt, xterm) just blink on the screen and disappear. I can however run Netscape and many other applications. Dowgrading pam back to RH7.2 or RH7.1 version did not help. Neither did changing pam_unix to pam_pwdb as was suggested in other bug discussion. Although I may have not done all checks consistenly.