ssh + su problem

[Will Parsons]

Michael Ross wrote:
> On Wed, 04 Jun 2014 21:30:09 +0200, Will Parsons <varro at nodomain.invalid>  
> wrote:
>
>> Matthias Apitz wrote:
>>>
>>> Try:
>>> - become root in anther vt-session locally,
>>> - issue the 'su' command, still without providing a password
>>> - look as root for the PID of the 'su' and attach something like
>>>   # truss -o /tmp/su.tr -f -p PID
>>> - provide the password to the 'su'
>>> - check the file /tmp/su.tr what the 'su' complains about
>>
>> Thanks.  Although I haven't solved the problem yet, I now know from
>> the truss output that the immediate cause is that my root password
>> contains the sequence "'A", and this was getting translated to
>> meta-A.  (It would have course been obvious if the password echo were
>> not being surpressed.)
>>
>> Curiously enough, although translation happens both for Cygwin ssh and
>> PuTTY, they do different things.
>>
>> On cygwin ssh, if type 'A on the command line, I see:
>>
>> \303\201
>
> That's unicode for Á ( A with acute ), not 'A ( single-quote + A ), isn't  
> it?
>
>> Using PuTTY:
>>
>> \301
>
> And that would be ISO-8859-1 for A with acute.

Yes.

>> (which I guess is meta-A)
>>
>> I'm not sure where this is coming from, but if all else fails, I think
>> I should be able to get around it by changing my root password.

Just to conclude this matter, the issue is solely a Windows
configuration issue and has nothing to do with FreeBSD (or Cygwin).
After a great deal of digging (I hate Windows), I found that changing
the Default input language from "English (United States) - United
States-International" to "English (United States) - US" turns off the
translation of quote-A to A-acute.  (The difference in behaviour
between Cygwin ssh and PuTTY was due a PuTTY setting for the remote
character set being set to Latin-1.)

-- 
Will