Sudo not working?

[GDB-B&W-X.3.9]

On Nov 3, 2005, at 10:20 AM, John DeCarlo wrote:

> On 11/2/05, GDB-B&W-X. 3. 9 <dougburton at vevayindiana.net> wrote:
>>
>> auto login myself at startup, it has left me wondering why sudo did 
>> not
>> work.  Each and everything I would attempt to use the command on would
>>  fail.
> Surely you must have seen an error message.  Are you doing this via 
> Alt-F2 or are you opening a terminal (Applications -> System Tools -> 
> Konsole)?  I agree it is annoying that Alt-F2 won't let you see any 
> error messages.
>
> Mostly errors with using sudo involve trying to use the root password 
> instead of your own. 
>
> But there are other kinds of errors, too.  For instance, I just 
> changed my host name to a value that wasn't in my /etc/hosts file.  It 
> wouldn't let me use sudo again, because it couldn't look up my host 
> name.  Weird.
>
>
> -- 
> John DeCarlo, My Views Are My Own--

Okay I did a little more snooping today and checked the auth.log to see 
if there were any clues there.  Here is a sample of what I found.

Nov  2 19:47:55 localhost gdm[7495]: (pam_unix) session opened for user 
doug by (uid=0)
Nov  2 19:50:45 localhost sudo: (pam_unix) authentication failure; 
logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty= ruser= rhost=  user=doug
Nov  2 19:51:41 localhost sudo:     doug : command not allowed ; 
TTY=unknown ; PWD=/home/doug ; USER=root ; COMMAND=validate
Nov  2 19:52:21 localhost sudo:     doug : command not allowed ; 
TTY=unknown ; PWD=/home/doug ; USER=root ; COMMAND=validate
Nov  2 19:53:11 localhost gdm[8289]: (pam_unix) authentication failure; 
logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=:20 ruser= rhost=  user=root
Nov  2 19:53:57 localhost gdm[8289]: (pam_unix) session opened for user 
doug by (uid=0)
Nov  2 19:54:13 localhost sudo:     doug : command not allowed ; 
TTY=unknown ; PWD=/home/doug ; USER=root ; COMMAND=validate

I'm not well enough versed in deciphering error codes to know exactly 
what is happening here, but I can see there was a auth failure, perhaps 
something to do with the user id?  FYI I was logged in as myself (doug) 
and tried both through the gui as well as a terminal.  I now have the 
problem solved using the method I outlined, but I would like to know 
why sudo didn't work as it should have for future reference.  Thanks

Just a message from Doug...