[colug-432] su broken on ...

[Thomas W. cranston]

On 02/21/2011 09:39 AM, Richard Hornsby wrote:
> On Feb 21, 2011, at 09:27 , Rob Funk wrote:
>
>    
>> On Monday, February 21, 2011 10:19:03 am Thomas W. cranston wrote:
>>      
>>> Getting a different number of characters is probably a symptom of
>>> something wrong.
>>>        
>> I disagree completely. I've seen many systems that show some small number of
>> dots rather than dots matching the character count in the password. Keep in
>> mind that in a well-designed system, the actual password (including its
>> length) isn't even retrievable at all.
>>
>> You're chasing a red herring here.
>>      
>
> I'm with Rob on this one.  Your /etc/passwd (or /etc/shadow) contains one-way hashes.  As far as I know, there is no way from that to actually determine the length of the stored password, at least not in any way that makes sense for the purposes of putting a series of *'s into a box.  (Intentionally excluding password cracking tools like John the Ripper from this discussion.)
>
> You can certainly test this by changing your password to something of 5 characters, 10, 15, 20 etc and seeing if the "current password: ******" changes.  However, this is a tangential distraction unlikely to lead you to why 'su' appears to be broken.
>
> -rj
>
>
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>    
Hmm. I'm wondering if he is getting the same behavior on both the 
desktop and the laptop.

Tom