Locked Myself Out - Cannot "su"

Jerry McAllister jerrymc at msu.edu
Mon May 28 14:34:38 UTC 2007


On Sun, May 27, 2007 at 07:17:20PM -0400, Schiz0 wrote:

> This is one of those things where after you realize what you've done,
> you just want to smack yourself.
> 
> I've been working on hardening my FreeBSD 6.2-Stable box. I disabled
> root login from everywhere, including the console (The box isn't
> physically secure, so I didn't want anyone screwing around). Now, me
> being stupid, didn't reboot after making all these changes to harden
> it. So I finally rebooted (With the secure level set to 2) and I found
> that I can't run "su." I get the following error:
> 
> $ su -
> su: not running setuid
> 
> I can't shutdown since I can't become root, so I pulled the plug and
> rebooted into single-user mode. I edited /etc/rc.conf and set
> kern_securelevel_enable="NO"
> 
> I rebooted again, but for some reason I still get the same error for "su."
> 
> So basically, I locked myself out of my box completely. I fail :-(
> 
> su has the following permissions:
> -r-sr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   schg   12240 May 13 13:15 su

That looks correct.  It is the same as mine except the size is different.
It is probably a different version.

Is your id in the wheel group in /etc/group?

Are you in some weird shell?  (tcsh[csh] is least weird on FreeBSD, 
followed by sh)

////jerry

> 
> And sudo isn't installed, unfortunately. Any ideas of how to get root back?
> 
> Thanks!
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