Ryan, On Thursday 04 November 2004 13:22, Ryan McCain wrote:
Can someone help me understand this?
the user "tstaffor" does not have the same UID as root, however when he does "su -", it doesnt prompt him for a password. I've never seen this.
It doesn't prove anything, but the fact that tstaffor's prompt ends with the pound sign suggests that the shell already has root privilege. If so, it would explain why su (to any subsequent user) does not prompt for a password. Use the "id" command to show the user and group IDs in effect for that user and that shell. My hunch is that you'll find the user ID to be zero (root).
dss-dr93la01:~ # who tstaffor pts/4 Nov 4 10:08 (172.20.11.82) dss-dr93la01:~ # w 13:13:49 up 6 days, 4:50, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 USER TTY LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT tstaffor pts/4 10:08 0.00s 0.14s 0.01s sshd: tstafford [priv] dss-dr93la01:~ # su - dss-dr93la01:~ # whoami root dss-dr93la01:~ #
Randall Schulz