How can I re-add myself to the sudoers file [SOLVED]

webbja123 · 2021-04-13 01:30:41

I realized that I was not able to install certain packages without becoming the root user on my machine. After a brief investigation I found that the command

wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

lines in my /etc/sudoer file was not un-commented. I used the visudo command and uncommented it in the vim editor. However, after doing so it appears that I unadded my username from the file because now I cannot use the sudo command without getting the following error.

username is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported

How do I add my username back to the sudoers file? [SOLVED]

Last edited by webbja123 (2021-04-13 13:10:26)

GaKu999 · 2021-04-13 01:57:35

More exactly, you are not in the wheel group, you must add your user to the wheel group using usermod.

Something like:

# usermod -a -G wheel your_username_here

webbja123 · 2021-04-13 03:00:52

I already tried that and it did not fix the issue, which surprised me!

GaKu999 · 2021-04-13 03:28:43

Did you re-login?

Post output of the command groups and the contents of sudoers...

seth · 2021-04-13 06:46:48

%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

However I'm not sure how the entire scenario adds up:

I was not able to install certain packages without becoming the root user

You're not able to install any packages w/o root permissions.

now I cannot use the sudo command without getting the following error

This seems to imply that the user previously was added to the sudoers and you could sudo - in which case even adding the wheel *group* (the "%") to the sudoers and yourself to the wheel group wouldn't have made any difference to begin with?

GaKu999 wrote:

Post … the contents of sudoers

Yes, please.
I think you "uncommented" the wheel group by removing the "%" (what turned the group into a user - not yours) but there's also a chance that you ran into this meme:

webbja123 · 2021-04-13 13:09:50

That was the issue. I accidentally deleted the % symbol with the # symbol in front of wheel. Unfortunately that has revealed another issue, but I will create another post to describe that. Thank you.

Arch Linux

#1 2021-04-13 01:30:41

How can I re-add myself to the sudoers file [SOLVED]

#2 2021-04-13 01:57:35

Re: How can I re-add myself to the sudoers file [SOLVED]

#3 2021-04-13 03:00:52

Re: How can I re-add myself to the sudoers file [SOLVED]

#4 2021-04-13 03:28:43

Re: How can I re-add myself to the sudoers file [SOLVED]

#5 2021-04-13 06:46:48

Re: How can I re-add myself to the sudoers file [SOLVED]

#6 2021-04-13 13:09:50

Re: How can I re-add myself to the sudoers file [SOLVED]

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