This is the same day as a fresh install of TW on my new laptop (i partitioned and formatted everything).
I can log in as myself but can not su to root or any other root auth requiring me to type a password
i CAN ssh in as root (password-less) <= this should be a big clue but i don’t know what to make of it
rebooting doesn’t help at all.
How can i get more verbose info ?
What does it mean ‘user unknown’ ?
Can’t retrieve authentication info from where? and why? whats the error?
I’m in /etc/shadow and /etc/group i checked (and so is root)
The id command reports my user # and group # correctly too
journalctl shows this:
check pass; user unknown
password check failed for user (root)
pam_unix(su:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=1000 euid=1000 tty=/dev/pts/4 ruser="OBFUSCATED ME" r>
FAILED SU (to root) "OBFUSCATED ME" on pts/4
Are you attempting to login at the graphic screen? Have you tried to login to a terminal?
CTRL-ALT-F1 should get you a command line. Can you login there – as yourself or as root?
I tried logging in to the gui screen for yast and with su to root in konsole - both fail, any login i tried as a user seems to work ok
Ctrl-Alt-F2 and logging in as root works. ssh to the system as root works too
I fixed it!
First i tried a memtest just to be sure it wasn’t some kind of HW glitch corrupting things. Believe it or not I have seen bad memory make a disk format fail - repeatedly at the same spot in the format.
So, HW ok, the next thing i did was try the Update option from the install DVD.
Whatever the update did, it corrected the bad file/setting.
I’m glad it is fixed. It’s unfortunate that we don’t know exactly what went wrong.
Yeh, i feel like i only hacked it instead of learning the root cause so i could avoid it in the future or, if it was some kind of corner case bug, report it so it could get fixed