Sudo has stopped working. Is there a Rescue Mode?

[NiksaVel]

I was installing VirtualBox, when the Sudo command stopped working. Using it doesn't change anything, doesn't put me in root, for example. I do get asked for my password.

ahem... you do realise that sudo doesn't "put" you in a root mode, it just executes the command as root....


if you want root mode use

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sudo su

[sanguinemoon]

I doubt you really need a rescue mood for these issues. Rescue mood is for if you can't boot up at all or possibly if you can't boot to a gui.

If somehow you uninstalled that plugin, just reinstall it through Synaptic.

If you do sudo (command) and it asks you for your password and you can execute your command, it seems like it's working as its supposed to.

[sanguinemoon]

Do this

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ls -l /usr/bin/sudo

It should look like

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-rwsr-sr-x 1 root root 91508 2006-10-09 07:37 /usr/bin/sudo

Post your output here

[sanguinemoon]

Yeah, that does look right. So it wasn't what I thought it might be, which would actually be an easy fix.

I have one other idea and if this doesn't work, reinstalling is probably the easiest way. Boot into the livecd and do.

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 nano (where the livecd mounts the hard disk that you have mint on) /etc/sudoers 

In this I'm assuming the livecd has nano. This is a tiny bit of a hack because normally you can only edit /etc/sudoers using visudoers, which wouldn't work because that command doesn't allow you to enter a path. But I noticed that Mint actually uses nano for this, and not vi. Anyway, the point is make sure the last lines of /etc/sudoers look exactly like this:

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 # User privilege specification
root    ALL=(ALL) ALL

# Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

If not, change them to match. Saving in nano is easy, just Ctrl 0 for write out. If this doesn't work, my guess would be that you somehow managed to take yourself out of the admin group.

[sanguinemoon]

This is getting tricky . The things that I can think of that you need do to fix this require that you have sudo working in the the first place. sudo -i simulates a login as root so you can edit the /etc/group file so that your user is in the admin like like "admin(number):(username)", but I think you already see the problem with that...

[sanguinemoon]

Silly me! From the livecd sudo nano (where the live cd mounts Mint)/etc/group If your username isn't in the admin line, add it.

If this still doesn't work, I don't know

[ido]

hi,

In the line before the last one (group file) you have : adm115:
There I think you have to add your user name as you did at the beginning of the file, that is where it was something like adm4: john.