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

[Chris Green]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 12:23:54PM +0000, Colin Law wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Mar 2020 at 12:17, Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:
> > ...
> > Yes, dead simple, it took only a minute or so.  Reboot, hit ESC,
> > select recovery mode and then 'drop to root prompt'.  Do the required
> > usermod command, restart and all is well again.
> 
> You may well find various other things don't work because you have
> removed those groups to, so you may have to add them back as you find
> them.  To save hassle it might be a good idea to create a new user
> with admin permissions and then look at what groups that is in, and
> then add them to yourself too.  Otherwise you may find in six months
> time that something you use only rarely does not work and you won't
> necessarily think of the missing group problem.
> 
It was a missing group membership (vboxusers) that started this whole
saga, I added vboxusers and thus removed sudo by mistake.  However I
have a fairly un-complex system so I don't believe there's any other
groups I *have* to be a member of.

I run xubuntu 19.10 on two systems (my dekstop and a laptop), I often
find that comparing things on the two systems will tell me where
something has gone awry.

-- 
Chris Green