Local Root Access

Description:

I’ve had a couple instances where I went to sudo su and it would say I’m not in the sudoers.

To Resolve:

1. logout

2. login as root

3. type: usermod -a -G wheel (username)

4. Then exit and log back in as your user.

5. If you can’t login as root:

   • Reboot. You’ll be given 5 seconds at the boot menu to select the operating system kernel to boot into.
   • At the boot menu, press e to edit the existing kernel (Core).
   • In the boot grub menu select option to edit. Select Option to edit (e)
   • Go to the line of Linux 16 and change ro with rw init=/sysroot/bin/sh
   • Now press Control+x to start on single user mode.
   • Now access the system with this command - chroot /sysroot
   • Reset the password - passwd root
   • Update selinux information - touch /.autorelabel
   • Exit chroot - exit
   • Reboot your system - reboot
   • Now do steps above to give another user sudo rights as it’s best practice to not use root directly for anything except for tasks like these.