• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Notes to Self

  • Aviation Weather from NOAA Plugin
    • KZZV
    • Bad Shortcode
    • Simple Metar
  • Meetings
  • Meetings Map

Mark Chouinard / February 28, 2014

How to fix “user is not in the sudoers file” in Ubuntu

While adding myself to the www-data group ( long story ) on my Ubuntu 12.04 server, I inadvertently forgot the -a

usermod -G www-data mark

Before long, I was told my username was not in the sudoers file and the incident was going to be reported, apparently back to me.  Short story, here’s how I fixed it:

Reboot into recovery mode ( you know, the second option – Ubuntu, with Linux 3.5.0-45-generic (recovery mode) )

Select root – Drop to root shell prompt

Execute the following:

mount -o remount,rw /

usermod -a -G sudo mark

reboot

That first line got me out of read-only mode, the second added me back to the sudo/admin group and the last rebooted.  Problem solved.

note:  prior to 12.04, I believe you would need to use admin instead of sudo

Filed Under: Ubuntu Tagged With: Command line, permissions, sudo

Primary Sidebar

Footer

Copyright © 2021 · machouinard · Log in