Bug 19713

Summary:	su doesn't work on plain user logged from lxdm
Product:	Mageia	Reporter:	Giuseppe Ghibò <ghibomgx>
Component:	RPM Packages	Assignee:	Nicolas Salguero <nicolas.salguero>
Status:	RESOLVED OLD	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	Normal	CC:	marja11, nicolas.salguero
Version:	6
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Source RPM:	lxdm-0.5.3-4.mga6	CVE:
Status comment:

Description Giuseppe Ghibò 2016-11-04 14:37:31 CET

Description of problem:

When a user is logged in a session started from lxdm (e.g. under Mate), and then opens a terminal, such user can't become root with "su".

Poking around the problem seems to be tied to audit and loginuid. In fact for that user you'll have a loginuid of -1, e.g. with

cat /proc/self/loginuid

you get 4294967295, which is the unsigned int for -1. Here is some further info I found:

http://people.redhat.com/sgrubb/audit/audit-faq.txt

which says:

Any process that runs before the auditing capability is turned on in the kernel will get loginuid 4294967295.

Comment 1 Nicolas Salguero 2016-11-04 14:56:52 CET

Hi,

I cannot reproduce the problem when I log into either MATE or LXDE from LXDM in a Virtualbox x86_64 VM: if I open mate-terminal or lxterminal and then type "su", I become root after giving the password.

Do you have something specific regarding audit, for example?

Best regards,

Nico.

CC: (none) => nicolas.salguero

Comment 2 Marja Van Waes 2016-11-04 23:48:17 CET

@ Nicolas

Thanks for already having started to look into this :-)

CC: (none) => marja11
Assignee: bugsquad => nicolas.salguero

Comment 3 Nicolas Salguero 2021-01-20 15:48:23 CET

I think the problem concerned only Mageia 6.

Resolution: (none) => OLD
Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Version: Cauldron => 6