Ubuntu
shadow package

Lost Administrator Privileges

Asked by Craig Sears

I upgraded to 12.04 LTS from 10.10. My Account settings show that I am the Administrator, but when I try to make changes to anything it says that I do not have Administrator premissions.

Here is what I have for $ groups; echo; lsb_release -a: uname -a

sears@sears-Latitude-D520:~$ groups; echo; lsb_release -a: uname -a
sears adm dialout cdrom plugdev lpadmin admin sambashare

Usage: lsb_release [options]

lsb_release: error: no such option: -:

Any suggestions?

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

Did you upgrade directly from 10.10 to 12.04?

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Craig Sears (searscr) said : 		#2

Yes, it was a direct upgrade.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#3

Then I suggest you reinstall. Leapfrogging releases is not advised and WILL break your OS. From 10.10 you needed to upgrade to 11.04 (Natty) then upgrade to 11.10 (Oneiric) then finally to 12.04 (Precise).

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#4

The ONLY time when missing the interim releases is when you are upgrading LTS to the next LTS, for example Lucid (10.04) to Precise (12.04) is supported and will work with no adverse effects.

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Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure) said : 		#5

...Unless you really upgraded from 10.04 to 12.04. Since 10.04 was the previous LTS release, you can upgrade from it to 12.04. I ask if maybe you did this because I don't think it's really possible to *accidentally* upgrade from 10.10 to 12.04 LTS. You'd have to manually edit sources.list, to do an unsupported upgrade.

So if it really was 10.04 that you started with, please let us know, and please also give a specific example of an operation you're not able to perform. The output of the command you ran indicates that you are an administrator. To gather more information, please also run this:

sudo cat /etc/sudoers

Then enter your password. As you enter it, you won't see any placeholder characters (like *), but that's OK. Just type it in and press enter.

That will tell us if you can perform administrative tasks from the command-line. If you can, it will also give us details of how sudo (which is one of the mechanisms used to perform administrative tasks) is configured.

@actionparsnip
I wonder if the problem is actually with PolicyKit.

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Craig Sears (searscr) said : 		#6

Here is what I got after runing sudo/cat/etc/sudoers:

#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# Please consider adding local content in /etc/sudoers.d/ instead of
# directly modifying this file.
#
# See the man page for details on how to write a sudoers file.
#
Defaults env_reset
Defaults secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"

# Host alias specification

# User alias specification

# Cmnd alias specification

# User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

# Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

# Allow members of group sudo to execute any command
%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

# See sudoers(5) for more information on "#include" directives:

#includedir /etc/sudoers.d

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