I'm not sure if this has been posted before (I've looked but can't find
anything.) I recently reinstalled debian because the only user that my
system could use was root. When I tried to su to any user except root I
would get error messages:
su: cannot run /bin/bash: Permission denied
When I tried to login as another user:
Unable to cd to "/home/porp"
Now this creates many problems except the obvious one (I have to use root
always): no daemons or programs can run as another user--exim (mail), the
cron.daily find (nobody), or any others. Before I continue, I'll list the
permissions of certain files:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 364336 Jul 25 02:45 /bin/bash
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 9512 Jun 2 09:59 /bin/su
drwxr-sr-x 2 porp porp 1024 Jul 24 14:49 porp
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 2048 Jul 25 02:39 bin
drwxrwsr-x 4 root staff 1024 Jul 24 22:14 home
I've been on irc.debian.org and have asked many people to help me discover
the problem but no one has been of much help. Nevertheless, I decided to
reinstall. I figured doing that would fix all problems. And it did. I
could login as any one, exim would work, and I was happy. But as soon as I
upgraded to potato (I like many of the packages in unstable), every thing
broke again. Now I'm sure this can't be a widespread problem because I
would have found solutions. But I cannot figure out what the problem is.
It can't be the permissions on bash because if I change the user's shell in
/etc/passwd, I get the same error, just a different shell is listed. It has
to be with some potato packages, either one or a combination of some are
conflicting or broken. But then again I do not know because many people use
potato. I just know that I'm not smart enough to figure it out, and my
system is broken. I really do hope you guys can help.
