su: Sorry in HP-UX while switching from normal user to root user

October 10, 2017

Problem:

I have an HP-UX 11.31 server, for hardening and securing the server I have disabled the root login on this server.

How to Disable Root SHH Login in HP-UX?

But after disabling the root login, I was not able to switch to the root user. I was able to log in as a normal user but when I was trying to switch to root user it is showing the error “su: Sorry” as shown below.

login as: dbappweb
Password:
Last successful login: Thu Aug 31 12:32:41 IST 2017 172.10.10.11
$
$ su - root
Password:
su: Sorry

Reason:

When we create a user using the command useradd command without using any parameter then the user is created with the sh shell which you can see in the password file /etc/passwd as shown below:

# useradd dbappweb

$ cat /etc/passwd
.
.
dbappweb:x:112:20::/home/dbappweb:/sbin/sh
.
.

Solution:

To resolve the above issue first I deleted the user dbappweb and created the same user again by using the command given below. Now we can see that in the password file /etc/passwd that user-created with ksh shell.

# userdel dbappweb

# useradd -g users -m -k /etc/skel -s /usr/bin/ksh dbappweb

$ cat /etc/passwd
.
.
sonu:x:112:20::/home/dbappweb:/usr/bin/ksh
.
.

Now we can successfully switch from normal user dbappweb to root user as shown below.

login as: dbappweb
Password:

$ su - root
Password:

Value of TERM has been set to "xterm".
WARNING: YOU ARE SUPERUSER !!

#

 

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