I’ve stumbled upon a weird problem after my linux recovery. With normal user credentials I was not able to properly execute the su root
After some investigation in /var/log/auth.log I found the following error:
Mar 8 19:12:38 noah login[2956]: pam_unix(login:session): session opened for user hipo by LOGIN(uid=0)
Mar 8 19:13:14 noah unix_chkpwd[3442]: check pass; user unknown
Mar 8 19:13:24 noah unix_chkpwd[3452]: check pass; user unknown
Mar 8 19:13:24 noah unix_chkpwd[3452]: password check failed for user (root)
Mar 8 19:13:24 noah su[3441]: pam_unix(su:auth): authentication failure; logname=hipo uid=1000 euid=1000 tty=/dev/tty2 ruser=hipo rhost= user=root
Mar 8 19:13:26 noah su[3441]: pam_authenticate: Authentication failure
Mar 8 19:13:26 noah su[3441]: FAILED su for root by hipo
On linuxforums website I’ve found some people complaining about the same issue as mine. Somebody in the forums pointed out that the issue is directly caused by the /etc/pam.d/su pam configuration file.
Logically I’ve checked which debian package does this file belongs to in order to reinstall the package with the command:
debian:~# dpkg -S /etc/pam.d/su
login: /etc/pam.d/su
Next I reinstalled the login package with:
debian:~# apt-get install --reinstall login
Now after the reinstall of the login deb was completed the issues with su root from normal user account are gone.
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Tags: Solution to can't become root with "su root" - (pam_authenticate: Authentication failure) solution
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.204 Safari/534.16
Goood! It worked for me, many thanks!
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.16) Gecko/20110319 Firefox/3.6.16
Very helpful, I faced the same issue, after reinstalling the login package on squeeze, everything fine…
thanks mate
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
looks interesting…
View CommentView Commentwhat if it’s a remote server and i don’t have ssh root access?
:((((
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; bg; rv:1.9.2.16) Gecko/20110319 Firefox/3.6.16
Use telnet, or try to overwrite the file with telnet or smth if you can use some web interface or smth to overwite files on the server.
View CommentView CommentSorry for being into this mess 😐
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; it; rv:1.9.2.23) Gecko/20110920 Firefox/3.6.23
you saved my life! it worked, thanks
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; it; rv:1.9.0.19) Gecko/2010031422 Firefox/3.0.19 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
hi, had the same issue, but managed to solved with your advise, thanks
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/31.0.1650.63 Chrome/31.0.1650.63 Safari/537.36
Thanks! Many other posts on this were way off base. I was running Ubunutu 13.10, updated and could no longer su, but could ssh as root. This fixed the issue.
View CommentView CommentMozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.103 Safari/537.36
This no longer works as of Debian 8.
Instead one gets this result:
$sudo apt-get install –reinstall login
View CommentView CommentReading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Reinstallation of login is not possible, it cannot be downloaded.
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
libaudio2 libmng1 libqt4-network libqt4-xml libqtcore4 libqtdbus4 libqtgui4 qtcore4-l10n
Use ‘apt-get autoremove’ to remove them.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Thanks Daniilushka,
Did you find a work around for Debian 8?
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