Weird su problems
Well, living on the blleding edge seems to have finally bitten me in the ass
;-) I normally do an apt-get update;apt-get upgrade every week or so unless
I hear about major fixes. I did such an upgrade earlier today, upgrading
nearly everything that could be upgraded. The only immediate abnormality
was that X seemed to freeze (I could move the mouse, but clicking did
nothing) soon after I upgraded some Gnome packages.
When I got back to my machine later, I found that ppp had reset some
permissions on the ppp directory (it took dip off of the group, for some
reason). I went to su to root, and I got a bad password error. Of course,
I totally panicked. I quit X and restarted it, but the problem remained.
As a desperate measure, I switched to another console and tried to log in as
root and... it worked.
It looks like some element relating to su has been broken. I apologize for
not knowing which package contains su, but I have the latest version for
Potato (x86) as of Wednesday (yesterday). I've just discovered that
su fails to work on the console, too. Should I downgrade some packages (and
if so, how is that done?) or wait until the next version of package x(y,z)
to come out? Is anyone else having this problem?
Thanks,
-Chris
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