Re: su operation on RHES V5.2

[Jim Meyering]

"Licause, Al" <address@hidden> wrote:
> A few days ago, I sent an e-mail regarding the behaviour of
> su - username    as seen in Redhat enterprise edition v5 update 2.
>
> Briefly if you su - username and that user name is an ldap user,
> no action appears to be taken.   The log shows the user was accessed
> then immediately disconnected.
>
> We have since found that if the nscd daemon is running, the su - username
> command works for ldap users.     But as soon as nscd is stopped, the command
> again fails to take any action.
>
> We also reported that if su is run with strace, the command also succeeds.
>
> Can you tell us if this is expected behaviour ?

Thanks for the report.
However, upstream coreutils is phasing out support for "su",
and in fact, with the latest version, coreutils-6.12, it
doesn't even install that program, by default.

Since strace appears not to be useful, the next step is usually
to run su via a debugger like gdb.