Re: root login on console not allowed -- why and how?

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

Andreas Ntaflos wrote:

>A colleague of mine set up a Debian 3.1 (or was ist 3.0?) box a couple
>of months ago and has had the following problem since then:
>
>When booting the machine everything seems fine and it gets to the login
>prompt eventually. There every non-system, non-root user can login and
>(if authorized) do an `su'. All is well. A login as the superuser,
>however, fails. No matter what password is entered, the system refuses to
>let us in as root. The root-password can be changed without problem
>when `su'-ed to root so the problem is not that it's mistyped at the
>prompt or anything.
>
>A (I think) related problem is that there's only one virtual console
>available (the first). Pressing Alt-F2, ..., F12 doesn't work, no other
>ttys are there. That disturbs me.
>  
>
That _is_ odd; something must've gone wrong during the install.

I'd start by looking in "/etc/inittab", to see if it looks normal.

I'd also install chkrootkit; your colleague may have been compromised.


-- 
Kent West
Technology Support
/A/bilene /C/hristian /U/niversity