Note to self...

[johnridley]

it's "sudo usermod -aG (groups) user"

Do not forget the "a". Otherwise this group list will REPLACE the old groups.

You don't want to get kicked out of the sudo group, really. But if you do, boot to a live CD, then mkdir /ubuntu, mount (linux root) /ubuntu, chroot /ubuntu, then you can usermod -aG sudo user.

Comments

[erikvolson.livejournal.com]

Ahh, Linux. Needing special tools to edit /etc/group, and forgetting that the "can become root" group is called "wheel".

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I could rename "admin" to "wheel" but it's just words. Blame Stallman. Everyone else does.

I have hand edited group before, the commands are just easier. The one they warn you about is hand editing sudoers.

[jon787.livejournal.com]

On Debian and Ubuntu you can also cheat and use adduser.

adduser USER GROUP

Be careful, on other distros its a symlink to useradd rather than a seperate program.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I don't like that, it seems like they're making a command do something other than what it implies it will do, for no good reason other than typing convenience, but it is doc'd. I guess I don't have to use commands I don't like :/

[jvanhare.livejournal.com]

Heh, this post sounds suspiciously like the voice of experience. Lick yourself out of your own system root did you?

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

eeh, could be, doc.

[traveller42.livejournal.com]

I caught that, but this is where we separate the hackers from the users. He obviously fixed his own mistake.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it wasn't a big deal to fix once I figured out what had happened. It just confused me because at the time that I started having trouble authenticating to do updates in the GUI package manager, I also had a bash window open, and it had cached up my groups and was still letting me sudo.

Today I found another thing I missed; I'd taken myself out of the vbusers group, so VirtualBox wasn't giving me access to the USB devices. The symptom was that the flatbed scanner wasn't running in the virtual XP session, but finding the root cause took about 10 minutes.