sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified

[Tom H]

>>>> http://www.sudo.ws/pipermail/sudo-users/2009-August/004140.html

>> The point of the link was that if you add
>> Defaults visiblepw
>> to
>> /etc/sudoers
>> "You can restore the old behavior"

> Ah, I see now what you mean.
> Strange enough, it works now, without any changes. No idea what the
> problem could have been.

If the problem comes back, this is from the sudoers man page:

visiblepw       By default, sudo will refuse to run if the user must
                       enter a password but it is not possible to disable echo
                       on the terminal.  If the visiblepw flag is set, sudo
                       will prompt for a password even when it would be
                       visible on the screen.  This makes it possible to run
                       things like "rsh somehost sudo ls" since rsh(1) does
                       not allocate a tty.  This flag is off by default.