ssh + su problem

[Michael Ross]

On Wed, 04 Jun 2014 21:30:09 +0200, Will Parsons <varro at nodomain.invalid>  
wrote:

> Matthias Apitz wrote:
>> El d?a Tuesday, June 03, 2014 a las 09:48:01PM +0000, Will Parsons  
>> escribi?:
>>
>>> >> % su
>>> >> Password:
>>> >> su: Sorry
>>> >> %
>>> >>
>>>
>>> No - doesn't help.  (Again, note that there's no problem su-ing
>>> locally, only after loggin in remotely with ssh.)
>>
>> Try:
>> - become root in anther vt-session locally,
>> - issue the 'su' command, still without providing a password
>> - look as root for the PID of the 'su' and attach something like
>>   # truss -o /tmp/su.tr -f -p PID
>> - provide the password to the 'su'
>> - check the file /tmp/su.tr what the 'su' complains about
>
> Thanks.  Although I haven't solved the problem yet, I now know from
> the truss output that the immediate cause is that my root password
> contains the sequence "'A", and this was getting translated to
> meta-A.  (It would have course been obvious if the password echo were
> not being surpressed.)
>
> Curiously enough, although translation happens both for Cygwin ssh and
> PuTTY, they do different things.
>
> On cygwin ssh, if type 'A on the command line, I see:
>
> \303\201

That's unicode for Á ( A with acute ), not 'A ( single-quote + A ), isn't  
it?


>
> Using PuTTY:
>
> \301

And that would be ISO-8859-1 for A with acute.



>
> (which I guess is meta-A)
>
> I'm not sure where this is coming from, but if all else fails, I think
> I should be able to get around it by changing my root password.