[sudo-users] sudo su fails with sudo: setreuid(ROOT_UID, user_uid): Operation not permitted

ben thielsen btb at bitrate.net
Mon Sep 7 15:54:47 EDT 2009


hi-

i'm using sudo 1.7.2, courtesy of debian testing, and am having  
difficulty troubleshooting the above error.  things had been working  
well prior to upgrade a few packages, but now all users experience the  
above error.  this server has one local user (/etc/passwd) and the  
remainder and in ldap.  i also had sudo's config in ldap, but have  
reverted to a traditional setup (/etc/sudoers) in the process of  
trying to troubleshoot).

 >cat /etc/sudoers
# /etc/sudoers
#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# See the man page for details on how to write a sudoers file.
#

Defaults	env_reset

# Host alias specification

# User alias specification

# Cmnd alias specification

# User privilege specification
root	ALL=(ALL) ALL

# Allow members of group sudo to not need a password
# (Note that later entries override this, so you might need to move
# it further down)
%sudo ALL=(ALL) ALL

localadmin	ALL=(ALL) ALL

localadmin is the local user in /etc/passwd:

 >whoami
localadmin

 >sudo su
sudo: setreuid(ROOT_UID, user_uid): Operation not permitted

i've read the man page for setreuid(2), so i have a basic  
understanding of what it does, and i see that there's a configure  
option regarding use of this, but i don't understand it well enough to  
know whether or not it should work and something else is broken, or if  
perhaps the package should have been compiled using the --disable- 
setreuid but wasn't.

any guidance is much appreciated.

thanks
-ben



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