I can not su to root on my Sun Solaris 9 (SPARC) box, even with the correct password

From: Kevin Shen (KevinWinstonShen_at_netscape.net)
Date: 12/30/03 

Date: 29 Dec 2003 16:52:40 -0800

Could someone help me out with my problem / issue? I would greatly
appreciate and be thankful for any help and / or guidance that anyone
can give me.

I recently upgraded the OS on my Sun box from Solaris 8 to Solaris 9
(SPARC platform). When I login as a regular user and then switch my
login user id to root (using the su - ) command, I am not able to log
in as root. I used the correct root password but still am not able to
successfully su to root. I get the following error, when I attempt to
su to root, in the listing below:

 Mon Dec 29 18:28:26 #whoami
kshen
 Mon Dec 29 18:28:28 #su -
Password:
su: incorrect password

I have the following configured and running on my Sun box. I am
running an Ultra 1 140, with 512 MB of RAM, an externally attached
SCSI hard drive array, and a 100 Base-T S-Bus Network card. Yeah, I
must admit that this box may be slow for Solaris 9, but it works well
for what it is primarily being used for- as an NFS / SAMBA (SMB) file
server. I am using NIS / YP for my authentication and this Sun box is
NOT neither running as an NIS master nor as an NIS slave server. The
NIS server that this Sun box "ypbind's to" is a Red Hat Linux 9 box.
I am using the standard PAM-based authentication on this Sun box and
am not using Kerebros of any one of those new authentication schemes /
protocols.

In addition the user id in my listing, "kshen" is an account that is
being propagated through the NIS / YP Linux server. Also, this user,
kshen is in the following groups, as shown in the listing below:

 Mon Dec 29 18:28:36 #group Mon Dec 29 18:28:36 #groups kshen
kshen : wheel xgrp company

I have also modified my /etc/groups file and added a group, wheel and
reassigned the group staff id # from 10 to 11, my /etc/groups file, as
shown below:

root::0:root
other::1:
bin::2:root,bin,daemon
sys::3:adm,bin,root,sys
adm::4:root,adm,daemon
uucp::5:root,uucp
mail::6:root
tty::7:root,adm
lp::8:root,lp,adm
nuucp::9:root,nuucp
wheel::10:root:+
staff::11:+
daemon::12:root,daemon
sysadmin::14:
smmsp::25:smmsp
nobody::60001:
noaccess::60002:
nogroup::65534:
+:::

I had the same type of setup mentioned above, except that it was
running on Solaris 8 and had no problems to su - to root from a
regular authenticated user. Does anyone know what may be wrong with
my setup? Is there something that I may have overlooked or is there
something that I am missing, in order to get things to work properly?
Again, I would greatly appreciate any help and / or guidance regarding
this issue. Thanks.

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