Suddenly, my core 3 box is having too much security: non-priveledged users are unable to use; usermount, shutdown, halt, may not shutdown from the gnome menu, and I am unable to sudo (I may su). Trying to sudo gets me the message," Sorry, sudo must be setuid root" . Here is the output of ls -l
-rwS--x--x 1 root root 93736 Oct 4 2004 sudo
This happens from gnome and also at virtual consoles. As I can su, I can run all these programs from with a xterm, but students at our school are unable to use the floppy or cdrom, and the staff members are unable to turn it off at nighttime, I have trained them not to press the big button on the front. And the usermount tool no longer has entries for the floppy or cdrom. Oh yeah, when I choose any program from the gnome menu which requires root-level access, I get the same message as anyone who tries to shudown from the menu; insufficient rights. These changes all occured at once. We are using:
gnome-desktop2.8.0-3
sudo-1.6.7p5-30.1
Thanks, kurt

That's odd. Have you tried reinstalling those packages? GCC shouldn't affect those programs on Fedora.

I had reinstalled sudo, without result. On a brighter note, I have discovered that both /etc/sudoers and /etc/fstab had been returned to their default state. I had been removed from sudoers and the entries for the floppy and cdrom had had the mount option <i>users</i> replaced with <i>pamconsole,exec</i>. I can't imagine how, unless it was part of an upgrade. But I don't think that should rewrite configutation files. an edit of the fstab file has once more given students the right to use floppys and cdroms, but the teaching staff is unable to halt the computer at nightime and I remain unable to sudo. Any help would be appreciated

Had similiar problem on fedora 9. To correct I removed and re-install the usermode program.

# rpm -e --nodeps usermode
# yum install usermode

when trying to run "sudo hdparm" i get command not found. but i can log in as root and run hdparm! same goes for su.

i tried reinstalling usermode as suggested.

Where do "hdparm" resides ? (locate / -iname hdparm)
Try once "sudo /pathto/hdparm.

Maybe a "path issue".

Regards,

Well, the original idea of sudo was to allow only specified non-root users to only run specified root-powers cmds.
It wasn't really designed to give unlimited powers/cmds to any user in sudoers file, but that seems to be the way a lot of people use it these days...
Check the contents of sudoers file.