How I broke sudo on my Dads Mac and how I fixed it
19 January, 2024
Prologue
Currently, I'm in the process of migrating my Steam Deck to NixOS. Today finally arrived my 1 TB NVMe, so I rushed to installing it and reinstalling NixOS as I already had a working configuration. The annoying part is, that, when using Jovian-NixOS you need to compile the kernel. As this takes long and my father owns a M1 Mac, I thought about building my NixOS configuration on the mac and copying it to the Steam Deck.
The Problem
I then installed Nix on the Mac and got everything working, but as I wanted to build my NixOS Configuration on the Mac, the build failed. It failed, because I couldn't enter the sudo password. After much browsing the web, I wanted to make sudo passwordless. So I open visudo and changed
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL
to
%admin ALL=(ALL) :NOPASSWD ALL
Do you see the mistake? It's the wrong place column. But I was in a rush, saved the file, wanted to test out my new fancy passwordless sudo by running sudo echo test and got greeted by a alex is not in suderos file.
The Journey begins
Try 1
I tried out the here described “Finder” solution but failed. I just couldn't change the permission back. An hour later, I moved on to recovery mode.
Try 2 — Recovery Mode, my savior
So, I finally booted into recovery mode, and logged in. Then mounted the Data disk via the disk utility program.
Now I could open a terminal, navigate to /foo/bar/etc and repair the file permission while also fixing the typo.
What I've learned
- If visudo asks you if you really want to save the File, don't blindly type yes!
- root is your friend
I would love to hear about your funny tech fails. Just send me an email.