*BSD News Article 65403


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From: ted@wiz.plymouth.edu (Ted Wisniewski)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: 'su' in FreeBSD sucks!!!
Date: 10 Apr 1996 03:16:36 GMT
Organization: Plymouth State College -- Plymouth, NH
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Hee-Joon Park (h-park7@ehsn12.cen.uiuc.edu) wrote:
: Here's the problem.
: Developers for FreeBSD were I guess, security-conscious, looking 
: at the su program.
: Only certain users belonging to a certain group(say, wheel, for example)
: can run su.
: Unfortunately, not knowing this "security-conscious" feature of
: su in FreeBSD ahead of time, i did something silly.

Sorry,  I can't resist this....  Your are complaining that FreeBSD is too secure
for you?  If Linux lets just anyone su to root it is insecure...

	Now for the Fix.

		CTRL-ALT-DEL  this should allow you to reboot cleanly.
		Boot single user (ie. use the -s flag at boot).
		You will be prompted for a shell (use /bin/csh)
		do (mount /usr) I assume you shutdown cleanly otherwise
		you will have to fsck the /usr partition.
		do: (vipw)  and edit the entry for root to again be /bin/sh


needs special books published (It is different than other Unix'es).