[Discuss] su stopped working

[Murray Strome]

Thanks, Noel.

 /bin/ping was not setuid either -- I have changed that.  It wasn't 
lately, but could have been the cause of the problem because I think I 
may have accidentally done a chmod -R before I went away on my last 
trip.  I don't have tripwire installed. However, if I did accidentally 
use the chmod -R incorrectly, lots of things are probably incorrect. 
Anyway to fix them without reinstalling?

Murray

Noel Burton-Krahn wrote:
> Check out /bin/ping, it should be setuid too.  I've done that to 
> myself before, accidentally overwriting permissions on files.  I think 
> tripwire may record the original file permissions (if you are already 
> running it).  Did you do a chmod -R lately?
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Murray Strome" <wmstrome at shaw.ca>
> To: "VLUG" <discuss at vlug.org>
> Sent: Sunday, October 15, 2006 4:47 PM
> Subject: [Discuss] su stopped working
>
>
>> I tried to su and got a message something like
>>
>> su: cannot set groups: Operation not permitted
>>
>> Doing some searching with Google, I found that my problem was likely 
>> that the the permissions were not correct for /bin/su  -- I think 
>> they were something like
>>
>> -rwxr-xr-x
>>
>> One of the items I found said that the permissions SHOULD be
>>
>> -rwsr-xr-x    -- or 4755
>>
>> Of course, I couldn't do anything from my user session, so I logged 
>> out then logged in as root, then did a chmod.
>>
>> It now seems to work, but I am wondering how it got changed in the 
>> first place, and what other permissions may be incorrect.
>>
>> Any ideas as to what I should be looking for?
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> Murray