SUMMARY: Strange su problem

From: Chris Heathcote <chrish_at_unorthodoxstyles.com>
Date: Thu Apr 19 2001 - 06:14:45 EDT
Many thanks to all that responded, and re-affirmed my belief that there's no
such thing as a stupid OS, just a stupid sysadmin.

The key to the problem was Titan - a great hardener for Solaris, that, well,
tightened a few nuts too much. Entirely my mistake for not changing the
defaults when I ran it.

It turned out the root password had expired, after the default Titan setting
of 13 weeks. SSH compounded the problem because it meant we missed the
warnings for any shell passwords.

Thanks to Alan Reichert for that.

Many thanks to Hendrik Visage, Hamid Ouyachi, Sugan Moodley, and Derrick D.
Daugherty for trying to find potential holes that I could use to regain
root. Unfortunately, all bases were covered, so a trip to go and see my
machine is in order.

eating humble pie
Chris.
-- 
     every day, computers are making people easier to use

              http://www.unorthodoxstyles.com
Received on Thu Apr 19 11:14:45 2001

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