I've lost sudo access and I don't really understand why

[Colin Law]

On Wed, 18 Mar 2020 at 20:57, Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:
>
> I'm running xubuntu 19.10 and I've somehow lost the ability to sudo to
> root.

You may have removed yourself from the sudo group.  If you have
another user configured then login to that and add the first back in.
Otherwise these instructions will probably help.  They are a bit old
but I think should still be basically ok.
https://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/fixsudo
Once sorted then create another spare user so you can more easily get
out of this sort of hole.  It is a good idea to have a spare user
anyway so when something goes wrong you can check it with that user to
see if it is a system problem a a user config problem.

Colin

>
> I *suspect* the cause was doing a usermod command to add my user to
> group vboxusers (so that VirtualBox USB works).  Since I did that I get
> the following error when I try to do anything as root using sudo:-
>
>     ris at esprimo$ sudo reboot
>     [sudo] password for chris:
>     Sorry, user chris is not allowed to execute '/usr/sbin/reboot' as root on esprimo.zbmc.eu.
>     chris at esprimo$
>
> So how do I get my root access back (and at the same time not lose
> being in vboxusers for VirtualBox)?
>
> --
> Chris Green
>
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