Password not working with Sudo

Ha!, Well I took my own advice and created a new Admin account and gues what? Terminal accepts the password. Looks like my account is corrupt somewhere. Not sure if this means I need to move everything to a new account or if there are steps I can take to fix it. I'll try permisions repair first as that's the only thing that springs to mind right now.

Thanks for your help.

I'm resurrecting this thread because the same problem has happened again.

After trying all the suggestions above, thanks everyone, I finally gave in and did a clean install of Mountain Lion. I didn't migrate anything over from Time Machine or my clone, I just started from scratch and slowly started to add the apps I use the most.

Just recently I needed to use the sudo command in terminal and the same old problem rears it's head, it asks for my password and when I enter it I just get "Sorry try again".

This is only on my user account, which has admin privilidges. When I try on the "spare" admin account it works fine. Even more bizarre, I have three Macs and the same problem exists on all three. All three are running 10.8.2 and were all installed independently of each other.

I'm really stumped/frustrated by this as it's obviously something to do with how I'm using/set up the machines or maybe a piece of software I run.

If anyone has any ideas at all I'd be grateful. Thanks

Thanks, I just tried that and I still get the same response.😕

This is the mesage that is generated in console after each attempt to use the sudo command.

03/09/2012 11:57:38.143 sudo[29759]: nigel : 1 incorrect password attempt ; TTY=ttys000 ; PWD=/Users/nigel ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/fing

Hi Barney, sorry for the delay in replying, I had to work away yesterday.

Ok I tried changing my password to "qwertyuiop" but still no joy. Still getting the same response. I think I'll have to ring AppleCare and see if they can sugest anything, but I'm guessing the next step will be to create a new user account and see if the problem persists.

Hi William. Yes I'm running an Admin account. I've even tried logging into the other admin account and changing my account to standard, restarting, then changing it back to admin, restarting again to see if that would correct some missing permissions but no joy.

Hi Bob, thanks for looking. Yes I've done the whole password reset thing, both within System Prefs and also from the Recovery Disk utility and yes I am using the correct password for the logged in account.

I did try enabling root user, just so I could execute the command, but that made no difference, it wouldn't accept the root password either.

There must be something up with my user account as when I try the same command from my "stand by" Admin account, which I don't generally use, it works fine.

Hi Bob

I've checked my Home folder permissions in Get Info and they are idetical to Admin standby user, ie "Username"(me) Read & Write, staff Read only, everyone, Read only. All the folders except Applications & Public have the red "no entry" icon in the bottom right corner when viewed in Finder from the Admin account.

Below is the terminal output for id -a

id -a

uid=501(nigelmonks) gid=20(staff) groups=20(staff),12(everyone),33(_appstore),61(localaccounts),79(_appserverusr) ,80(admin),

81(_appserveradm),98(_lpadmin),100(_lpoperator),204(_developer),401(com.apple.ac cess_screensharing)

This is identical to the output for the Admin user account.

And here is the content of the sudoers file

# sudoers file.

#

# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.

# Failure to use 'visudo' may result in syntax or file permission errors

# that prevent sudo from running.

#

# See the sudoers man page for the details on how to write a sudoers file.

#

# Host alias specification

# User alias specification

# Cmnd alias specification

# Defaults specification

Defaults env_reset

Defaults env_keep += "BLOCKSIZE"

Defaults env_keep += "COLORFGBG COLORTERM"

Defaults env_keep += "__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING"

Defaults env_keep += "CHARSET LANG LANGUAGE LC_ALL LC_COLLATE LC_CTYPE"

Defaults env_keep += "LC_MESSAGES LC_MONETARY LC_NUMERIC LC_TIME"

Defaults env_keep += "LINES COLUMNS"

Defaults env_keep += "LSCOLORS"

Defaults env_keep += "SSH_AUTH_SOCK"

Defaults env_keep += "TZ"

Defaults env_keep += "DISPLAY XAUTHORIZATION XAUTHORITY"

Defaults env_keep += "EDITOR VISUAL"

Defaults env_keep += "HOME MAIL"

# Runas alias specification

# User privilege specification

root ALL=(ALL) ALL

%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

# Uncomment to allow people in group wheel to run all commands

# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

# Same thing without a password

# %wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

# Samples

# %users ALL=/sbin/mount /cdrom,/sbin/umount /cdrom

# %users localhost=/sbin/shutdown -h now

Hope this is of some use, as I've no idea what I'm looking for with this 🙂

Thanks again for your help.