I had the unfortunate experience to lock myself out from using sudo on my NAS server.
All I wanted to do was give my user permission to run smartctl, which usually requires root privileges. This can be achieved by editing the /etc/sudoers file.
However I did not use visudo for this task. After removing the pound sign from the #include statement – which, let’s be honest, looks like a comment that needs to be uncommented – I saved the file and closed it.
At this moment visudo would have raised an error, if I had used it, and prevented me from saving the invalid sudoers file.
Long story short I was locked out from using the sudo command. After booting into a Linux live/rescue image from USB I could fix the syntax error in /etc/sudoers.
The moral of the whole story, better use visudo when editing /etc/sudoers.
That’s it.
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