[tlug] PAM problem?

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

A couple days ago I was "blessed" with a hosed RAID 1 setup.  After
the recovery process was over, I found that a lot of files on the
system were left with the UID that is apparently root on one of the
rescue disks (don't know if this was pilot error or not; anything is
possible at 4:00 AM).  I found them all using (naturally) find and
set them back to root.root.

System is RH 7.3.  My userid is a member of wheel, although that is
not required for su on this system.

All related problems seem to now have vanished except two: 

1) My normal userid cannot su to root or any other user (there normally
aren't any login accounts, but I added a test user for troubleshooting
this problem).  Logins from the command prompt or display manager
work normally for both root and the test user.

In all cases, after giving the password, there is a short pause
and it returns "su: incorrect password."

I suspect ownership or permissions of some PAM module are involved
in this, but am not sure what to look at.  The relevant files in
/etc/pam.d are all world-readable, so this seems OK. Any advice 
is appreciated.


The second problem may be related:

If I exit Gnome or KDE and choose shutdown or reboot as a logout
option, it fails and just goes back to the login screen.  This
again seems like a permissions or ownership problem, but kdm and
gdm are both root.root, so again, I'm not sure where to look for
this, either.  Tips or a relevant FM to RTFM are appreciated.

TIA,

Jonathan
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