Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2002 21:56:03 -0400 From: "Brian T. Schellenberger" <bts@babbleon.org> To: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: passwd: Permission denied Message-ID: <200209042156.04364.bts@babbleon.org> In-Reply-To: <20020904231555.GC28529@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophi> References: <200209041755.24531.bts@babbleon.org> <20020904231555.GC28529@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophi>
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Thanks . . .
On Wednesday 04 September 2002 07:15 pm, Matthew Seaman wrote:
| On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 05:55:24PM -0400, Brian T. Schellenberger
wrote:
| > I have a user account that can't change its own password. If it
| > tries, it gets:
| >
| > passwd: Permission denied
|
| That usually indicates an attempt by an ordinary non-privileged user
| to change the password of another user.
Ah! Your guess below wasn't it, but that was my clue.
I was trying to change the password from an xterm where I had done an
su - baduser
to change to the userid. I thought that with the - option su acted
"just like" a login, but I was wrong. When I actually logged in from a
console window, it worked just fine.
Live and learn.
Does anybody know how su - differs from a "real" login, exactly?
Is there a way to "log in" for real in an X window? If I try "login" it
says "not a login shell" and if I try telnet, I am reminded that I
chose not to set up a local telnet server--and it seems like a pretty
significant security comprimise if I have to set up a telnet server
just to allow local login in an X window.
Not that it's that big a deal, really--I only rarely need to do "real"
login things and for that I *can* switch to a console--but I would like
to know on general principles . . .
| When you cloned the account did you perhaps not give it a unique UID
| number? This snippet will print out how often each UID number is
| mentioned in the master.passwd file:
|
| awk -F: '{ print $3 }' < /etc/master.passwd | sort -n | uniq -c
|
| It can also occur if you remove the SUID bit from /usr/bin/passwd or
| mount /usr nosuid, but then no one other than root would be able to
| change passwords.
|
| Cheers,
|
| Matthew
--
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal)
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