Becoming super user in suntools?

[att!ihlpf!marselle at research.att.com]

I have a problem that maybe someone in net-land has dealt with before:

I have a diskless Sun-3/50, called strauss, which boots off a diskful
Sun-3/140, called pete.  I can execute the "su" command to become the
super user on either machine, except when I'm in Suntools on pete.  Then
the "su" command just hangs and I have to hit ctrl-C to get out of it.
Actually, when I hit ctrl-C, it prints "Password:", but if I type
something, it gets echoed and I still have to hit ctrl-C again, after
which it prints "Sorry" and I get my shell prompt back.  If I'm not in
suntools on pete, I can become super-user.  On strauss, I have no problems
either in or out of Suntools.  In fact, I can be logged in as "jim" (my
userid) on strauss, rlogin to pete as jim, and execute "su" fine.  I can
also be logged in to pete, in Suntools, rlogin to pete from a window and
then get "su" to work properly.

I'm running Yellow Pages; pete is a YP slave server and strauss is a
client.  There's another Sun-3/280 which is the YP master server; I'm not
privileged to become super-user there (I'm not in the wheel group).  If I
try to do a "su" on the 280, I get the message

"You do not have permission to su root"

which is what I would expect.  By the way, I'm running SunOS 4.0.

Jim Marselle
AT&T Bell Labs
Indian Hill Park
1B-431
Naperville, IL 60566
(312) 416-4108

[[ Check permissions on the pseudo tty's.  They should all be 666 (unless
someone is *logged in on* one).  Suntools uses the pseudo tty's, but does
not change the access permissions.  Also, just for grins, check /dev/tty.
It should be "666 1 root 2, 0".  "su" opens "/dev/tty" to ask for the
password and that *may* be what is causing the problem.  --wnl ]]