Question

2

Sudo does not recognize my password anymore

rated 0 times [ 2] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 2898 / 3 Years ago, wed, july 7, 2021, 4:41:18

The problem is happening on a remote server, so everything is done through ssh.

I can login with my key, no problem here.

I can change my password at will with passwd (which I believe shows that it's the correct password for my user).

My user is in the sudoers file (I could check with pkexec cat /etc/sudoers and entering the root password)

However, being logged in as my regular user, I can't run sudo commands anymore, it just says Sorry, try again as if the password was mistyped.

I have no clue what causes that, I've tried changing my password, which I could, but it doesn't solve the sudo problem.

$ lsb_release -a

No LSB modules are available.

Distributor ID: Ubuntu

Description:    Ubuntu 12.10

Release:        12.10

Codename:       quantal

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eanda

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answered 3 Years ago leadprogres · Accepted Answer

Ok, fixed it, but I don't really know what caused it in the first place.

The issue was from a line in /etc/pam.d/common-session-noninteractive

It had

session [success=1 default=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so service in cron 

quiet use_uid

And it appears that having this on two lines instead of one was breaking PAM completely.
I just changed it to

session [success=1 default=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so service in cron quiet use_uid

And now everything is back to normal.

I have to thank @AaronD for his comment as it pointed me to investigat PAM, which I found nothing wrong at first (looking at /etc/pam.d/sudo) but when I looked at /var/log/auth.log and noticed all the PAM errors I felt I was digging in the right direction.

The log entry looked like these :

Dec 28 15:43:33 srv12120 sudo: PAM (sudo) illegal module type: quiet

Dec 28 15:43:33 srv12120 sudo: PAM pam_parse: expecting return value; [...use_uid]

Dec 28 15:43:33 srv12120 sudo: PAM (sudo) no module name supplied

A little bit of googling gave me this forum post which gave me the solution highlighted above.