rhodes@grebyn.com (Ned Rhodes) (02/16/90)
Many thanks to the people who responded to my query for help with the problems that I had with su. For the record, they were, Bennet Todd, Nik Simpson, Bill Houle, Doug Gwyn, Michael Corrigan, Greg Lockwood, Alan Deehr, Mark Hewitt, Carl Lowenstein Chris Johnson and Don Nichols. Basically the suggestions boiled down to three major areas. First it was suspected that there was corruption in the passwd file. A run of /etc/pwck showed otherwise. Secondly, it was suggested that the shell file was actually missing, which it was not. Thirdly, a permission problem was suggested in /bin/login or /bin/sh or at the root ("/") level. It turns out that the problem was a permission problem. Only root had access to /, and so su and login could not read the disk. Obviously the solution is easy once you recognize the symptom. I guess I was hoping for an error message like "Cannot access foobar", rather than "no Shell", which is supposed to cover a number of error possibilities. Once again, thank you all for suggesting solutions. -- Ned W. Rhodes (703) 534-2297 (voice) Software Systems Group (703) 237-9654 (fax) 2001 North Kenilworth Street CompuServe : 71321,424 Arlington, VA 22205 rhodes@grebyn.COM
goertz@hpwrce.HP.COM ( Mike Goertz) (02/20/90)
Check that whatever shell you have specified in /etc/passwd has the necessary permissions, check all the way back to the root directory. I have also seen this behavior when the login shell in passwd was a script, in these cases we handled it by changing the login shell to /bin/sh and logged in once, after that we could change it back to the script and it worked fine.