<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /></head><body><div data-crea="font-wrapper" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 16px; direction: ltr"><div style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 16px"></div>On Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 20:09, Robert Heller <heller@deepsoft.com> wrote:<blockquote><div>At Fri, 14 Oct 2022 17:41:25 +0000 "Ubuntu user technical support,? not for general discussions" <<a target="_blank" href="mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com" style="cursor: inherit;">ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com</a>> wrote:<br><br><blockquote>Greetings,<br>I recently recovered an Ubuntu 21.04 box I had set up back then, and then "leased" to a relative.<br>I will upgrade it asap to 22.04 LTS, BUT, for reasons not relevant here, while doing backups and<br>generally "cleaning up" that box:<br>1) I made a mistake, issuing a chown command in /, thus messing up, among other things,<br>ownership of critical files in /etc/, so now sudo does not work anymore<br>2) AND I forgot the root password, so I cannot just "su" and fix those ownerships manually</blockquote><br><br>Ubuntu does not (normally) set a root password and you cannot (normally) log<br>into root. (One does 'sudo su -l root' if one must have a root login shell.)<br></div></blockquote><div><span><br></span></div><div><span>cannot do that, sorry if it was not clear:</span></div><div><span><br></span></div><div><span>#> sudo su -l root<br>sudo: /etc/sudo.conf is owned by uid 755, should be 0<br>sudo: /etc/sudo.conf is owned by uid 755, should be 0<br>sudo: /etc/sudoers is owned by uid 755, should be 0<br>sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting<br>sudo: error initializing audit plugin sudoers_audit</span></div><div><br></div><div>Marco</div></div></body></html>