*BSD News Article 65415


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From: h-park7@ehsn12.cen.uiuc.edu (Hee-Joon Park)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: 'su' in FreeBSD sucks!!!
Date: 9 Apr 1996 10:25:16 GMT
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 54
Message-ID: <4kdduc$3bb@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: ehsn12.cen.uiuc.edu
Summary: su

hello...

I just installed FreeBSD yesterday, and very
happy with what I've seen so far.

I already had Linux for quite some time, now
I have everything(Don't have DOS though)

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.
I logged as root, then ran "chsh" and
changed the shell to /bin/tcsh, but problem is that i assumed there 
was /bin/tcsh(being lazy), not necessirily didn't check it!
(guess i'll do that next time for sure) and guess what?

I can't log in as root anymore!
even though I provide right passwd, i've been kicked out
BSD saying it can't find such shell(yea yea... I now know
tcsh isn't located in /bin/!)

To make the matter more frustrating, I only created one user id which 
doesn't belong to any root group which means I can't run su!!!

So, how can I fix this problem??
hm..i tried many different things on my own but none of them
were successful..
1. use the boot floppy to run that sysinstall program
In there, there is the option for adding user, but
somehow it didn't work (just blinking)..hm..weird..didn't work..

2. tried to mount the BSD file system from Linux....
Didn't work neither. I was just told that BSD fs isn't supported by
Linux..

I know how to fix this problem if it happened in Linux,but
in BSD, you being the expert, can show me little trick
and save me a lot of time.

Please send replay to h-park@uiuc.edu or post if that's convenient
for you.

Sincerely 
heejoon

--
Heejoon Park                                            
Univ.of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign       
Dep.of Electrical and Computer Eng.                       h-park7@uiuc.edu
http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/~h-park7