Running random user programs as ROOT?!

[Jan Mikkelsen]

In article <867 at minya.UUCP> jc at minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
>BTW, this isn't purely hypothetical.  I recently added a dumb terminal
>to  this (Sys/VR3) system so that when X shoots itself in the foot and
>goes zombie on me, I have a back door to do something short of pushing
>the  reset  button.   But what I can do there is very limited, because
>when I type "su" it just says "Sorry", without even asking  me  for  a
>password.   TFM  hasn't  helped  at  all  to  explain  why  su  is  so
>recalcitrant.  I've done what any hacker would do  -  written  my  own
>version of su. Now I find that, according to the above, it is horribly
>broken.  I'd like to know how to make it less so.  How do I do that?
>
>If it's described somewhere in TFM (that I am too stupid to find), I'd
>like to know where, and how I missed it.

One place to look is probably getpass(3).  It sounds to me like you
have managed to loose /dev/tty.  Does anything else have problems asking
you for a password?
-- 
Jan Mikkelsen
janm at dramba.neis.oz.AU or janm%dramba.neis.oz at metro.ucc.su.oz.au
"She really is."