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Rasel Khan
Asked: 2014-08-20 10:43:18 +0800 CST

Sudo doesn't work: "/etc/sudoers is owned by uid 1000, should be 0"

  • 772

When I type a sudo command into the terminal it shows the following error:

sudo: /etc/sudoers is owned by uid 1000, should be 0
sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting
sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin

How do I fix this?

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4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Change the owner back to root:

    pkexec chown root:root /etc/sudoers /etc/sudoers.d -R

    Or use the visudo command to ensure general correctness of the files:

    pkexec visudo
    • 47

  2. Another option, in the case that one doesn't have the password for root or ubuntu users. I've fat-fingered ownership (more times than I want to admit) and ending up doing this:

    sudo chown -R owner:group /

    instead of this:

    sudo chown -R owner:group .

    This has almost always been in the context of a Vagrant-managed VirtualBox VM running Ubuntu headless, so YMMV. I'd never had a good fix until now, but this seems to do the trick easyishly.

    Repair

    • Create or edit /etc/rc.local
      • NOTE Do this as vagrant user without trying to set permissions to root.
    • For this task, /etc/rc.local should look like this:
    #!/bin/sh -e
#
# rc.local
#
# This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel.
# Make sure that the script will "exit 0" on success or any other
# value on error.
#
# In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution
# bits.
#
# By default this script does nothing.

chown -R root:root /etc/sudoers.d
chown root:root /etc/sudoers
chmod 440 /etc/sudoers

exit 0
    • Disconnect from SSH
    • Open VirtualBox Manager
    • Right-click VM in question
    • Select 'Close'=>'ACPI Shutdown'
    • Start the VM from the VirtualBox Manager by right-clicking the VM entry then selecting 'Start'=>'Normal Start'
    • SSH into VM
    • Use your now-restored sudo set permissions for children of / back to root:root

    After the fix is in place the commands in /etc/rc.local can be removed.

    • 1

  3. to recover from

    sudo chown myuser:myuser /etc/sudoers 
chmod u+w /etc/sudoers
chmod u-w /etc/sudoers
sudo chown root:root /etc/sudoers

    The last of which results in the "sudo: /etc/sudoers is owned by uid 1000, should be 0", etc. errors. I tried to su - sudo which I've seen suggested but I don't think the root password was ever set so that did not work.¹

    To fix this issue, I rebooted, dropped into a root shell and²

    chown root:root /etc/sudoers
passwd root #for good measure, e.g., so su - root would work in the future!

    Rebooted, voila.

    NB: The pkexec commands suggested did not work for me while I was initially trying to fix the problem. After it was fixed via the recovery mode root shell, I subsequently tried it and a GUI window popped up asking for my password and it did work so YMMV.

    ¹ After fixing the problem, I repeated the steps and was able to recover with²

    su - root
chown root:root /etc/sudoers

    ² The list of commands Rohlt suggests were unnecessary in my case but they might apply in other cases.

    • 1

  4. if you have set and have the root password, first run the following command

    $ su - root

    it will ask for the root password and then run following commands one by one

    chown root:root /etc/sudoers 
chmod 440 /etc/sudoers
chown -R root:root /etc/sudoers.d
chmod  755 /etc/sudoers.d 
chmod  440 /etc/sudoers.d/*
    • -1