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From: Will Parsons <varro@nodomain.invalid>
Subject: Re: ssh + su problem
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2014 19:30:09 +0000 (UTC)
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Matthias Apitz wrote:
> El d?a Tuesday, June 03, 2014 a las 09:48:01PM +0000, Will Parsons escribi?:
>
>> >> % su
>> >> Password:
>> >> su: Sorry
>> >> %
>> >> 
>> 
>> No - doesn't help.  (Again, note that there's no problem su-ing
>> locally, only after loggin in remotely with ssh.)
>
> Try: 
> - become root in anther vt-session locally,
> - issue the 'su' command, still without providing a password
> - look as root for the PID of the 'su' and attach something like
>   # truss -o /tmp/su.tr -f -p PID
> - provide the password to the 'su'
> - check the file /tmp/su.tr what the 'su' complains about

Thanks.  Although I haven't solved the problem yet, I now know from
the truss output that the immediate cause is that my root password
contains the sequence "'A", and this was getting translated to
meta-A.  (It would have course been obvious if the password echo were
not being surpressed.)

Curiously enough, although translation happens both for Cygwin ssh and
PuTTY, they do different things.

On cygwin ssh, if type 'A on the command line, I see:

\303\201

Using PuTTY:

\301

(which I guess is meta-A)

I'm not sure where this is coming from, but if all else fails, I think
I should be able to get around it by changing my root password.

-- 
Will