On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 10:02:50PM +0000, Ian Moore wrote: > Greets, all- > > I was hoping someone could help me out here. I finished LFS, and am > now working through the relevant parts of BLFS. Things are going > pretty smoothly, I'm fixing some mistakes I made in config files and > stuff (init.t?), I was working last night, and all of a sudden "su" > does not work. It hangs, hogging resources. > > Here's what I know: > > - I completed LFS 6.4rc1, started 11/19, using LiveCD 6.3r2, first boot on > 11/25 > > - I had gotten through BLFS ch 3, section "About Devices" before. su > still working. > > - I have already also installed (bc-1.06, OpenSSL-0.98g, and > wget-1.10.2), (libpng-1.2.29, pcre-7.6, slang-2.1.3, and nano-2.0.7), > and (procmail-3.22, sendmail-8.14.3, and fcron-3.0.4), and ntp-4.2.4p0 > > - At this point, su still worked. > > - I worked through the rest of ch 3, skipping the last two sections on > automount and nfs. I'll tackle those some other time if I need or > want them. > > - I was reading ch 4, but was basically going to skip all of it, at > least for now. I never installed cracklib or PAM or anything, so I > didn't need to re-install the shadow package. I tried that anyway, > and it didn't work.
I have no idea what went wrong, but there is no need to build everything, or even most things, in BLFS just in case they turn out to be useful. When I see people building slang and sendmail, I hope they are long-time 'mix users. If that is you, well and good. Also, BLFS is most decidedly not meant to be worked through in order. You need to decide what you want to build, look at the dependencies (if any), then look at the dependencies' dependencies and continue until you have a list of what to build. When you say you tried to reinstall shadow, but it didn't work, you do realise that shadow is what installs /bin/su ? I assume this was where 'su' broke, or do you mean something else broke it and you weren't able to reinstall shadow ? What do you mean by 'it didn't work' for reinstalling shadow ? I'm tempted to say "just reinstall shadow properly", but there is always the risk you won't be able to log in at all if that goes wrong. Should be fixable if you can still boot to the host and chroot, but it might also get messy, so based on the current lack of detail I'm NOT recommending that at the moment. You say you can still log in as root, so the situation should be recoverable. Perhaps you can build and install strace: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/strace/strace-4.5.18.tar.bz The book always says to su, but in this case I think you should log in as root to untar, build, and install it. On the term where you are logged in as root, try something like strace -u yourusername -f su 2>trace [ read the strace man page before trying that, to make sure you understand the options ] After it hangs, kill it. You will often get a *large* trace file. I find using 'view' to look at it helps, because of the colours from syntax highlighting. Perhaps it won't help at all, but you need to try to find what it is doing. Warning - part of the root password WILL show up in the trace. On my own successful attempt to do this from an xterm, I see write(3, "Password: "..., 10) = 10 read(3, "XXXXXXXXXXX\n"..., 4096) = XXXX [ suppressed! ] write(3, "\n"..., 1) = 1 - it's something _after_ this that might provide a clue. In my case, an ioctl (got through that) ... access to /etc/localtime with various calls, and in the middle of them an access to the log: connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/dev/log"...}, 110) = 0 and then I exited because I had no problem. Perhaps the FIRST thing to do is to take a look at /etc/localtime and /dev/log. Here, I've got [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ #ls -l /etc/localtime /dev/log srw-rw-rw- 1 root root 0 2008-11-29 18:56 /dev/log -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3661 2008-11-18 21:33 /etc/localtime Are yours similar to that ? If they differ significantly, that might point to the problem. But, if I was a gambling man I'd say the problem was somewhere in shadow. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
