su to root configuration error - unknown item

Message

sinisterdomestik · Post by **sinisterdomestik** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 9:42 pm

not sure if this is the right forum, but everytime i try and su, i get this, although it lets me change to root, not sure why, or what, this is/means

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sinister@BlackBeauty:~ su -
Password: 
configuration error - unknown item 'FAILLOG_ENAB' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'LASTLOG_ENAB' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'MOTD_FILE' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'FTMP_FILE' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'ENV_PATH' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'ENV_ROOTPATH' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'ENV_SUPATH' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'PASS_MIN_LEN' (notify administrator)
configuration error - unknown item 'CHFN_AUTH' (notify administrator)
root@BlackBeauty:~

anyone know what these mean??

Mod Edit: Made sticky and changed the title from "su to root error" - tomk
Unstuck. -- desultory

v3rtigo · Post by **v3rtigo** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 10:02 pm

Did you do etc-update after your last emerge?

I remember i had same problem few days ago when tried to login as root it solved after etc-update.

sinisterdomestik · Post by **sinisterdomestik** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 10:09 pm

ahhhhh, easy fix

thanks

zietbukuel · Post by **zietbukuel** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 5:50 pm

I cant fix it i get these message:

configuration error - unknown item 'PASS_MIN_LEN' (notify administrator)

BUT i have this in my /etc/login.defs

PASS_MIN_LEN 5

I already reinstalled pam-login, replaced the config files with the new ones, etc... any help?

Blue Fox · Post by **Blue Fox** » Sun Jan 08, 2006 9:57 pm

Well, up, this is happening to me today(ziet's problem, not the first one)

Blue Fox · Post by **Blue Fox** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 12:26 pm

I've figured this one out: In /etc/login.defs there is a line

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PASS_MIN_LEN 5

at the end of the file, commented it out and error is gone.

grad_guy · Post by **grad_guy** » Tue Mar 14, 2006 8:47 pm

I did this.

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etc-update

and

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env-update && source /etc/profile

But it doesn't help at all.

login.defs said those parameters are all optional, some said it'OK to just comment them out.

Is that the right way to fix this?
If someone could confirm me on this, it'd be nice.

##EDIT##
re-emerge pam-login and etc-update didn't help either

csab · Post by **csab** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 1:45 am

Just the stupid question to you, who could not solve this problem: when you run etc-update, you do let it to update your configuration files, right?

telengard · Post by **telengard** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 1:48 am

v3rtigo wrote:Did you do etc-update after your last emerge?

I remember i had same problem few days ago when tried to login as root it solved after etc-update.

I got this error also, but after building I could have sworn there was no message to update configs via etc-update. pam was one of the packages that was upgraded. That did fix the issue for me though, thanks for the help.

~telengard

grad_guy · Post by **grad_guy** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 2:08 am

csab wrote:Just the stupid question to you, who could not solve this problem: when you run etc-update, you do let it to update your configuration files, right?

Sorry for being a noob.
I know I am.

etc-update DOES help fix this if you let it update the config files.

Thanks

##EDIT##
What I actually did are the following(incase some need to know);
etc-update then let it auto-merge (-5)
Then I go after the files I think I change something in there, e.g. /etc/conf.d/local.start , /etc/conf.d/hostname , /etc/conf.d/domainname, /etc/rc.conf ...
And fix them.

I believe the topic deserves a little update, "[SOLVED]".

t35t0r · Post by **t35t0r** » Sat Mar 18, 2006 7:49 pm

The solution to this problem is emerge pam-login and then run dispatch-conf or etc-update and let it update the files, esp login.defs

StarDragon · Post by **StarDragon** » Sun Mar 19, 2006 10:53 pm

Cool, that works... I love you guys!

joe82 · Post by **joe82** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 12:51 pm

t35t0r wrote:The solution to this problem is emerge pam-login and then run dispatch-conf or etc-update and let it update the files, esp login.defs

Didn't work for me. After emerging pam-login no configuration files should be updatet. etc-update and dispatch-conf don't do anything. Someone may post his /etc/login.defs to check which lines can be removed or uncommented.

Thx

Pizentios · Post by **Pizentios** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 3:34 pm

i just commented out the lines in login.defs that were causing the errors, seems to work fin for me.

Gherkin · Post by **Gherkin** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 5:44 pm

I encountered this error whilst su'ing during an emerge -uD world. After the emerge was finished I ran etc-update, compared the changes to files I had modified and automerged the rest. Problem solved.

asterix404 · Post by **asterix404** » Mon Apr 17, 2006 6:52 pm

You know though, this is a funny funny thing... EVN_ROOTPATH for me is being bitchy. I made a horrid mistake (when will i learn) and deleated the old configs, the things that are like... .__cfg???? whatever. The funny bit from this is this:

ENV_ROOTPATH /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
ENV_SUPATH /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

my rootpath defaults to my user path when I log on as root, when I su this actuilly does work. It made my comptuer better! This to me means that they changed a lot of init vars in the last update and didn't bother to make the /etc/login.def backwards compatable thinking that all you would have to do is etc-update. IE I really think that even if you have these errors it's not going to do anything harmful, can someone back me up here though? I can't really see any security holes anywhere from the vars that are here, but this just seems to beg the question...

Where does root get it's path from? The only thing I could come up with was that the dev's made it just like the users where you have your .bashrc and this defines everything for your env login. If I run into some problems I'll start posting but for now, without a valid actual file, I am not seeing any issues. I could of course be horrably wrong though. ~Ben

sebastianfietzek · Post by **sebastianfietzek** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 5:23 am

hi!

i had the same problem and i guess i found a working solution, but it is not the best way to fix the problem so if there are other ways try these...

first you have to backup /etc/login.defs and the complete folder /etc/pam.d/ then you do "emerge --unmerge pam pam-login". after that you delete these files and folders (/etc/login.defs and /etc/pam.d/) completely and re-emerge pam and pam-login. (emerge pam pam-login). the last step is to copy the backed-up files back into the /etc-folder and do NOT overwrite the "newly" emerged files.

it worked for me, but like i said: if you can fix it in another way you should do it!

ptaylor · Post by **ptaylor** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 1:34 pm

this one scared me, but the etc-update worked

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etc-update
env-update && source /etc/profile

yay!

Post by **pacho2** » Sun Apr 23, 2006 1:05 pm

It's a gnome-system-tools bug. If you try to create a new user account using this app, login will fail

ajmacca · Post by **ajmacca** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 3:29 am

I just wanted to confirm that sebastianfietzek's method worked for me also. It's only been a day, and I haven't restarted yet, but after running

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env-update && source /etc/profile

everything is working fine. If I encounter any other problems, I'll post them back here. And before anybody asks, for some reason that escapes me now, I mustn't have let etc-update write a new login.defs file, which is why etc-update doesn't help me.

Post by **pacho2** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 10:18 am

If you run "users-admin" (from gnome-system-tools), you will suffer the problem again

avieth · Post by **avieth** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 7:46 pm

I've got my own solution. What I had done was updated world, then since I don't trust etc-update at all (it f**ked me over before) I didn't let it update anything. So I moved /etc/login.defs to /etc/login.defs.old and remerged pam-login. It worked.

senthilkumar00 · Post by **senthilkumar00** » Wed May 03, 2006 1:44 am

I had the same problem. I actually emerge pam-login and did etc-update with option -3. It worked for me

ed_f · Post by **ed_f** » Thu May 04, 2006 9:49 am

So the problem seems to be that some oprions are present in /etc/login.defs that the system does not recognize while loging in (or su-ing).
The only problem I had was the line "PASS_MIN_LEN 5".

I looked at the man page for login.defs and could not find any definition for PASS_MIN_LEN, however I found a man page on the internet which describes it as a password restriction option used by passwd (the man page : http://www.cs.vassar.edu/cgi-bin/man2html?login.defs+5). Could this be a deprecated option or distro-specific option or something like that?

I simply removed the line. The I tried to set the password to a very short one, and I still got a warning about the password beein to short.

Then I tried messing about with the user profiles with the gnome-system-tools and quite correctly the line "PASS_MIN_LEN 5" reappeared in /etc/login.defs/

MilkSjeik · Post by **MilkSjeik** » Sun May 07, 2006 7:06 pm

avieth wrote:I've got my own solution. What I had done was updated world, then since I don't trust etc-update at all (it f**ked me over before) I didn't let it update anything. So I moved /etc/login.defs to /etc/login.defs.old and remerged pam-login. It worked.

Same thing for me. I've also learned to not use Gnome windows when creating another user