# [SOLVED] su immediately displays "authentication failure"

## wazoo42

This box was working properly on friday, but something happened over the weekend. I almost always run etc-update immediately after emerging new packages, but perhaps I forgot to do this and the box rebooted while I was away. The basic problem is that I cannot login as root in a kde4 console or on one of the tty terminals. In kde4 I type su and the prompt for the root passwords never displays because "Authentication failure" appears immediately, followed by my normal user prompt. I have checked su and it appears the the permissions are incorrect according to the FAQ. 

```

-rws--x--x 1 root root  36712 Apr 20 10:25 /bin/su

```

How do I fix this given that I cannot login to root and do not have any user accounts with sudo privileges?Last edited by wazoo42 on Mon Apr 23, 2012 7:09 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## Etal

Looks like you got hit by this one too.

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## wazoo42

I think you are correct, though the symptoms look a little different. In any case, it was my not having run etc-update before rebooting. I gave my regular account sudo access using an ubuntu install, which allowed me to run etc-update. After completing the updates and rebooting the problem is gone. Thanks!

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