Cannot Sudo

Roberto Waltman ubuntu at rwaltman.com
Tue Aug 14 12:11:39 UTC 2007


L. Richard Cameron wrote:
 > ...
 > Whenever I try to "sudo" I get the reply "Administrator
 > is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported."
 > The passwords that I used have been changed and the fellow
 > who did it all is not forthcoming with them (or any help).

In addition to what others replied, you may try this:
Boot from the live CD, rename the existing sudoers file to 
something else and replace it with the one from the CD that 
allows anybody in the admin group to run sudo.
( You need to be part of the admin group, or add your group to 
/etc/sudoers.  The existing line in the cd "%admin ALL=(ALL) 
NOPASSWD: ALL" )
I agree with the recommendation to reinstall the system.
Even if nothing malicious was left behind, you'll never know 
exactly what was installed or how things were configured.

Regarding the passwords, you may (booting from live cd again) 
become root, (sudo -i -H), mount the old system's root, do a 
chroot into the mounted system and just change the password as usual.


Roberto Waltman





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