SUMMARY: su to root with no password

From: Chris Los (clos@trentu.ca)
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 14:08:43 EDT


A big thank you to all who replied so quickly. With your help
I was able to determine what was causing this strange behaviour with
the "su -" command. The answer: the root account had no passwd and thus
was allowing all members of the "system" to obtain root without it.
Thus, the mystery has been solved and i was the culprit who caused it
in the first place during the process of doing a global password change.
Needless to say root now has a new pword. :-)

-----Original Message-----

How is it possible for a non-root account to "su -" and not have to
enter a password to obtain the root identity??

The only thing special about the non-root account i'm using is that it
is a member of group "0:system". This is a new behaviour we're seeing
and am wondering if it is this group membership alone that is
permitting the root identity without the password.

  Is it possible to disable this behaviour without removing the account
from system group? (ie force user to enter the password before obtaining
root)

TIA



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Sat Apr 12 2008 - 10:48:52 EDT