CrunchBang Linux

djrakun

New Member

Registered: 2009-07-07

Posts: 4

users do not stay in sudoers list 15 minutes past login

Hi all,

I have a very bizarre problem with #! 8.10 on my dell latitude D505.  I've installed #! on several machines in the last week, ranging from a pentium II 266mhz with 256k ram to a toshiba T4010D pentium 4 tablet.  I've never had a problem with the install or 'importing' users from previous installations, but now I got a doozy and at least on my machine it is pretty reproduceable.  Here's the chain of events:

1. I start the 8.10 live cd and start the install wizard.  During the partition manager i choose 'manual', and i format the / partition from my previous ( ubuntu intrepid, upgraded from Hardy) partition.  I format this partition as ext3 as well as blow it out entirelly and create a partition as ext3.  I keep my /home partition intact, where i have my one user.  I create the same user in the wizard as the home drive with the same password.  Installation ensues and completes without an error

2. At the login manager, I enter my username and password and openbox starts up fine.  If I open a terminal I can use 'sudo' for about 15 minutes, so I figure I'm 'riding' my initial login credentials.  After 15 minutes I lose the ability to use 'sudo'.  The error message that returns is "could not open the /etc/sudoers file ( i might need to edit this as i'm paraphrasing.  35% done with the installation so when i reproduce again i'll put the exact message).

3. My session functions fine, although my lack of perms cripple the experience, until I log out.  Once I do this, I will not be able to log in as #! will not be able to start the gnome-session, and will dump me out to an xterm session which has no super user abilities, so I can't repair anything from this terminal. 

Now as I mentioned I have about 15 minutes to mess around after each re-install, so i've tried the obvious:  I've  used the installer to create a brand new user and then my user to the admin group

sudo adduser me
sudo adduser me admin

FWIW I've also viewed the /etc/group file and I already see my username in the admin line.  I've also tried to chmod the /etc/sudoers file to 777 and 444 and anything else i could think of but i get an error message that the file must be 0440, which makes sense but I thought i'd mention it anyway.

I'm no expert but I'm pretty clued up on debian and ubuntu so I think if you ask me for something to help with the investigation I can deliver, however I might have to manually type any log output via my other pc as I'll most likely be stuck with an limited xterm session when you request something. 

Please let me know if anyone has an Idea of what might be going on.  If I dont hear from anyone in a few days I'll likely transfer my homedrive to an external source and format the whole hdd and hope for the best

anonymous

The Mystery Member

From: Arch Linux Forums

Registered: 2008-11-29

Posts: 9,418

Re: users do not stay in sudoers list 15 minutes past login

If you create a new user, does it (the new user) work normally?

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djrakun

New Member

Registered: 2009-07-07

Posts: 4

Re: users do not stay in sudoers list 15 minutes past login

If you create a new user, does it (the new user) work normally?

No, the 'new' user displays the same characteristics, i.e. after 15 minutes can no longer do anything that requires sudo. 

Good question and sorry I didn't clarify.  I also thought that it was an issue with importing users from the old installation, only because the #! installer seemed to skip that step.  A home drive was created on my partition for the new user.