[colug-432] su broken on ...

[Phil Cuellar]

Disclaimer: Not a Linux expert, and I don't even play one on TV.

I recall that when using an earlier version of Ubuntu (jaunty maybe?)
, the wireless network password asterisks displayed in the box bore no
relation to the actual number of characters in the password. IIRC it
defaulted to eight asterisks.

YMMV...

~Phil



On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 10:42 AM, Thomas W. cranston
<cranston.thomas at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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