su doesn't work from regular or sudoers

Question

I'm trying to use su command to change my identity on ubuntu 18.04
But from neither regular user to sudoer user or sudoer to regular user it doesnt work!
I get

su: Authentication failure

The sudo works and i can login to my users using ssh (ssh user@127.0.0.1) but cannot use su

What is the problem?

my cammand is simply this:

from user bob:

su alice

Providing your actual command may help us to understand, it works for me fine.I suspect it's how you're using it, thus providing your command would help us understand why you're getting the failure message. (what parameter 'user' are you using, have you enabled 'root' if that's what you want to use) — guiverc, Mar 11 '20 at 23:34
Does this answer your question? su command + authentication failure — user535733, Mar 11 '20 at 23:36
@guiverc i'm simply using su with user name; please check my edit on question — Ariyan, Mar 11 '20 at 23:43
@user535733 it is about being root but i have problem with regular users — Ariyan, Mar 11 '20 at 23:46
A couple of possible causes I've seen are (1) missing setuid bit on the su executable (check with ls -l /bin/su) and (2) misconfigured /etc/pam.d/su file — steeldriver, Mar 12 '20 at 03:00

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 11 '20 at 23:55

0

You could try:

sudo passwd alice to renew password

Or, as a workaround:

sudo su - alice
sudo -i then su alice

When switching from root password isn't asked.

answered Mar 11 '20 at 23:55

Gryu

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su doesn't work from regular or sudoers

1 Answers1