Lost administrator rights
 

Hi,


Today some how I lost my admin right. now I can't mount any of the usb/attached drive. I can't unlock the user details.

Please help, I am using ubuntu 11.10

Thanks
Prashant Saraf

Boot to recovery mode.

Get to the root prompt.

Reset your password.

Apart from the answer given and because of you saying "somehow": how did this happen? Did you change any file or directory ownership or access permissions? Or did you (re-)configure something you (apparently) shouldn't have? What do the logs say?

i rebooted to recovery mode and tried above command with root user but got below error

This is what I did yesterday

1. I installed Oracle 11g Express Edition
2. I installed openbravo-3
3. I am unable to start oracle edition so I run following command

and rest i did not remember but i didn't use console :(

Also to check the logs and which log i should check??

Thanks
Prashant Saraf

Strange.

You did use your user name in place of the "<user name>" part of that command I hope.

yes I have used the actual user name. Can anyone help me on this??

You will have to give more information on how you installed these things and where you got them from.

Something has changed in you permissions, obviously, but some idea of how this happened has to be found before a solution can be found.

So what did you do? I agree you have to give more information what you did.


The usual: /var/log/* basically, anything that may hold a clue.

I remember one more thing... I go into setting --> user account to my user I set as auto login enable so I don't need to put login details every details. That is it I did. I also did regular system upgrade.

With all these I found new issue.. Now I am unable to restart/shutdown the system, on click of shutdown it goes to login screen and nothing happens.

Thanks
Prashant

Just to give my standard lecture, don't auto log in. There are some options in the "session" box on the login screen that come in mighty handy. Auto login is also not the best way to have a secure OS either.

That said, how did you install those 2 programs? This appears to be the important information.

Did you get them from the Ubuntu repo? Or somewhere else? If somewhere else, where?

What did you do to install them?

If this was done in your terminal there is a history kept of commands given there. I don't know what the default is but I have plenty of room and set the limit for saving all commands. The default is some number of lines limit.

I did install the Oracle using bin executable file.
and about openbravo-3 i install using the ubuntu repo(ppa:openbravo-isv/ppa). I have installed both of then in earlier version of ubuntu and didn't face any issue.

I think whatever is happen is either because of or changing to auto login.

While I am not a big fan of auto log in I can see no way that should effect your privileges.

I can see nothing wrong with your usermod command either. Have only used it once myself so I took a look at the man page to make sure that I remembered right. Could be I don't understand it quite right.

Have you tried using that command to add yourself to the admin group? This would have to be done from the root prompt probably.

Yes, I use above command to add me in dba group. And very strange thing with me now is the shutdown or restart button is not working... it only does log off :(

I am experiencing the EXACT same problem. I didn't do an Oracle install but rather ran the latest updates. I also had my user set to Auto login because the box is my MythBuntu backend and sometimes I need the wife to reboot it while I am away from the house. Earlier I had also tried out the boot with no password but then could not get it disabled. Now I have a box that won't let me change the password, won't automatically boot in, and is experiencing other issues. ARG!!!!