MacOS – su & sudo on OSX Mavericks

macospasswordsudo

I am trying to use su and sudo on my iMac that I did a fresh clean install of Mac OS X 10.9 and Server 3.0. I explicitly set the password for root with

passwd root

but when I try to use su or sudo from a local network account, it does not accept the password. When I was reading through some of the man pages for su, sudo and passwd, one of them (but I do not remember which) mentioned something about different behavior in an Open Directory environment. I tried digging around but could not find any more info.

Can anyone help me here?

Best Answer

dsenableroot -u $ADMIN_USERNAME -p $ADMIN_PASSWORD -r $ROOTSNEWPASSWORD

replace the variables with your admin username and password as well as the password you desire for root. At that point, you could sudo as the admin user or just su - and use the root password you set to become root.

In the end, you'll want to either configure sudo to allow the commands you use often from your non-admin account or get used to typing the root password when needed.

Related Solutions

Password problems changing users in Terminal

To switch to user postgres, type in Terminal:
```
sudo su - postgres
```
If you are asked for a password, type yours.

(The - in sudo su - changes the environment to that of the new user, and it's probably what you want. See man su for details.)
Now, to switch back to your user, simply type:
```
exit
```
to exit the current bash session and go back to your original bash session.

Note that if you type sudo su <user> as user postgres you need to identify yourself to sudo and type postgres's password, but as you say, it hasn't any, so it won't work. It may even be the case that user postgres is not allowed to use sudo at all.

MacOS – Confusion with sudo and multiple local accounts

You aren't carrying forward your shell environment into the su adm session. so if you echo $PATH in the usracc account and the adm account, you'll find that they aren't equal (which is why adm can't find the updatedb command). All you need to do is tell su that you want to carry forward your env (su -m adm should do it) or just add the path to updatedb.

Though on my box updatedb is called /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb and is a script.

Best Answer

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Password problems changing users in Terminal

MacOS – Confusion with sudo and multiple local accounts

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