su to root configuration error - unknown item

sinisterdomestik · l33t Joined: 28 Aug 2003 Posts: 685 Location: Texas

not sure if this is the right forum, but everytime i try and su, i get this, although it lets me change to root, not sure why, or what, this is/means

v3rtigo · Apprentice Joined: 15 Jun 2004 Posts: 179

Did you do etc-update after your last emerge?

I remember i had same problem few days ago when tried to login as root it solved after etc-update.

sinisterdomestik · l33t Joined: 28 Aug 2003 Posts: 685 Location: Texas

ahhhhh, easy fix

thanks
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zietbukuel · l33t Joined: 30 Dec 2005 Posts: 607

I cant fix it i get these message:

configuration error - unknown item 'PASS_MIN_LEN' (notify administrator)

BUT i have this in my /etc/login.defs

PASS_MIN_LEN 5

I already reinstalled pam-login, replaced the config files with the new ones, etc... any help?

Blue Fox · Apprentice Joined: 09 Apr 2004 Posts: 216

Well, up, this is happening to me today(ziet's problem, not the first one) :cry:

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Blue Fox · Apprentice Joined: 09 Apr 2004 Posts: 216

I've figured this one out: In /etc/login.defs there is a line

grad_guy · Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 8:47 pm Post subject:

I did this.

csab · Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 1:45 am Post subject:

Just the stupid question to you, who could not solve this problem: when you run etc-update, you do let it to update your configuration files, right?

telengard · n00b Joined: 21 Jan 2004 Posts: 12 Location: New Hampshire

grad_guy · Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 2:08 am Post subject:

t35t0r · Posted: Sat Mar 18, 2006 7:49 pm Post subject:

The solution to this problem is emerge pam-login and then run dispatch-conf or etc-update and let it update the files, esp login.defs

StarDragon · Guru Joined: 19 Jun 2005 Posts: 390 Location: tEXas

Cool, that works... I love you guys!

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joe82 · Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2006 12:51 pm Post subject:

Pizentios · Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2006 3:34 pm Post subject:

i just commented out the lines in login.defs that were causing the errors, seems to work fin for me.
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Gherkin · n00b Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 4

I encountered this error whilst su'ing during an emerge -uD world. After the emerge was finished I ran etc-update, compared the changes to files I had modified and automerged the rest. Problem solved.
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asterix404 · Apprentice Joined: 05 Nov 2004 Posts: 213

You know though, this is a funny funny thing... EVN_ROOTPATH for me is being bitchy. I made a horrid mistake (when will i learn) and deleated the old configs, the things that are like... .__cfg???? whatever. The funny bit from this is this:

ENV_ROOTPATH /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
ENV_SUPATH /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

my rootpath defaults to my user path when I log on as root, when I su this actuilly does work. It made my comptuer better! This to me means that they changed a lot of init vars in the last update and didn't bother to make the /etc/login.def backwards compatable thinking that all you would have to do is etc-update. IE I really think that even if you have these errors it's not going to do anything harmful, can someone back me up here though? I can't really see any security holes anywhere from the vars that are here, but this just seems to beg the question...

Where does root get it's path from? The only thing I could come up with was that the dev's made it just like the users where you have your .bashrc and this defines everything for your env login. If I run into some problems I'll start posting but for now, without a valid actual file, I am not seeing any issues. I could of course be horrably wrong though. ~Ben

sebastianfietzek · n00b Joined: 21 Apr 2006 Posts: 2

hi!

i had the same problem and i guess i found a working solution, but it is not the best way to fix the problem so if there are other ways try these...

first you have to backup /etc/login.defs and the complete folder /etc/pam.d/ then you do "emerge --unmerge pam pam-login". after that you delete these files and folders (/etc/login.defs and /etc/pam.d/) completely and re-emerge pam and pam-login. (emerge pam pam-login). the last step is to copy the backed-up files back into the /etc-folder and do NOT overwrite the "newly" emerged files.

it worked for me, but like i said: if you can fix it in another way you should do it!

ptaylor · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2006 Posts: 2

this one scared me, but the etc-update worked

pacho2 · Posted: Sun Apr 23, 2006 1:05 pm Post subject:

It's a gnome-system-tools bug. If you try to create a new user account using this app, login will fail

ajmacca · Posted: Sat Apr 29, 2006 3:29 am Post subject:

I just wanted to confirm that sebastianfietzek's method worked for me also. It's only been a day, and I haven't restarted yet, but after running

pacho2 · Posted: Sat Apr 29, 2006 10:18 am Post subject:

If you run "users-admin" (from gnome-system-tools), you will suffer the problem again

avieth · Veteran Joined: 17 Sep 2004 Posts: 1945 Location: Canada

I've got my own solution. What I had done was updated world, then since I don't trust etc-update at all (it f**ked me over before) I didn't let it update anything. So I moved /etc/login.defs to /etc/login.defs.old and remerged pam-login. It worked.

senthilkumar00 · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2005 Posts: 1

I had the same problem. I actually emerge pam-login and did etc-update with option -3. It worked for me

ed_f · n00b Joined: 04 May 2006 Posts: 1

So the problem seems to be that some oprions are present in /etc/login.defs that the system does not recognize while loging in (or su-ing).
The only problem I had was the line "PASS_MIN_LEN 5".

I looked at the man page for login.defs and could not find any definition for PASS_MIN_LEN, however I found a man page on the internet which describes it as a password restriction option used by passwd (the man page : http://www.cs.vassar.edu/cgi-bin/man2html?login.defs+5). Could this be a deprecated option or distro-specific option or something like that?

I simply removed the line. The I tried to set the password to a very short one, and I still got a warning about the password beein to short.

Then I tried messing about with the user profiles with the gnome-system-tools and quite correctly the line "PASS_MIN_LEN 5" reappeared in /etc/login.defs/

MilkSjeik · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2005 Posts: 66 Location: Belgium