Lost sudo, su password

ionmich · November 26, 2015, 4:26pm

openSUSE LEAP 42.1 KDE

I can log in as root from a console (CTL+ALT+F3) but when I open a console from KDE and invoke “su” or “sudo” and use the same password it responds with

su: Authentication failure

Any suggestions?

gogalthorp · November 26, 2015, 4:38pm

Sure of the cap locks??

Try rather then console log into terminal as yourself then try su still see a problem?

wolfi323 · November 26, 2015, 5:05pm

ionmich:

openSUSE LEAP 42.1 KDE

I can log in as root from a console (CTL+ALT+F3) but when I open a console from KDE and invoke “su” or “sudo” and use the same password it responds with
su: Authentication failure
Any suggestions?

Looks like some file permissions are wrong.

Login as root (in text mode preferably), and run this:

chkstat --system

If that doesn’t help, please post your security settings:

grep SECURITY /etc/sysconfig/security

su and sudo won’t work if you set that to “paranoid”.

ionmich · November 26, 2015, 9:22pm

wolfi323:

Looks like some file permissions are wrong.

Login as root (in text mode preferably), and run this:
chkstat --system
If that doesn’t help, please post your security settings:
grep SECURITY /etc/sysconfig/security
su and sudo won’t work if you set that to “paranoid”.

Following your suggestion, I read the man for chkstat (which I never knew existed) and looked at the output of chkstat --system. I then invoked chkstat --system --set and my problem disappeared.

Thanks for the advice.