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I followed bad instructions and left the -a out of:

usermod -a -G wireshark ak

Now all of my groups have been lost, including sudo permissions:

$ groups
ak wireshark

If I understand correctly, I should be able to fix this by booting to the recovery option in GRUB, but I'm not sure what groups need to be added back.

Where can I check to find out what groups I used to be in?

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  • mine shows adm dialout cdrom plugdev lpadmin admin sambashare. It might be a start to get it fixed.
    – Rinzwind
    Jul 24, 2011 at 17:39
  • 1
    once you are in the admin group you can add any other groups you need - look like this guy here had the same issue - ccollins.wordpress.com/2007/07/02/restore-default-ubuntu-groups
    – fossfreedom ♦
    Jul 24, 2011 at 17:45
  • put it in as an answer @fossfreedom and we can vote on it ;)
    – Rinzwind
    Jul 24, 2011 at 17:55

2 Answers 2

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3

In a standard Ubuntu installation there's a groups config backup file in /var/backups/group.bak. So (from a root recovery console) you could do something like

grep <your_username> /var/backups/group.bak

to list all groups you used to be in.

EDIT: as Lekensteyn rightly pointed out, it would be better to use the /etc/group- backup file, not the /var/backups/group.bak one.

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  • 2
    The previous version is stored in /etc/group-. On my system, /var/backups/group.bak is the same as /etc/group which indicates that /var/backups/group.bak is really a backup of /etc/group.
    – Lekensteyn
    Jul 24, 2011 at 20:37
  • @Lekensteyn: You're right. group.bak is (after a cron.daily job is run) the backup of /etc/group. The /etc/group- is a better option. I suggest you make your comment an answer.
    – arrange
    Jul 24, 2011 at 20:56
  • your answer is nearly complete and remembered me on the existence of /etc/group-. Feel free to include my comment in your answer ;)
    – Lekensteyn
    Jul 24, 2011 at 21:03
2

To recover you will need to boot from a live CD.

Mount the root partition (/).

e.g. if your root partition is on /dev/sda1

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
sudo chroot /mnt

Then edit the /etc/group file and add the admin group to yourself

cd /mnt/etc/
sudo nano group

find the admin group and add your user-id e.g. for me it would look like admin:x:121:fossfreedom

Save and Reboot. You should be able to use sudo and su again. You can then use Users and Groups to add in any groups you require:

source

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2
  • This doesn't answer my question of where I can check to find out what groups I used to be in.
    – ændrük
    Jul 25, 2011 at 15:47
  • @fossfreedom Excellent. Thanks, you just saved me a lot of time and headache. Due to my own stupidity I removed myself from admin group. Your solution above saved the day, and I learned quite a few things in the process.
    – bioShark
    Feb 9, 2012 at 23:30

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