Sudo not taking root password anymore?

General system Newbie
1

==> yay
[sudo] password for richardc:
Sorry, try again.
[sudo] password for richardc:
Sorry, try again.
[sudo] password for richardc:
sudo: 3 incorrect password attempts
→ error refreshing databases - exit status 1

This is now happening in both eos-update-aur and eos-update in welcome app. and in terminal when I run yay. Any idea’s what’s going on? Just started this morning. . .

Rich;)

2

Because you entered the incorrect password three times. Sudo will lock out that user account for a period of time (10 minutes, if I’m not mistaken).

If patience is not your virtue, you can reset it with the failock command.

For your reference:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Security#Lock_out_user_after_three_failed_login_attempts

1 Like
3

Thanks . . . problem solved. . . .caps lock was the initial problem. . . when I turned it off I couldn’t log in. Now everything works. Never had this problem before. . . thanks for the wiki. . .

Rich;)

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4

You might state what is new. Prompting for password? Rejecting password?

If the password prompt is new, then you may have corrupted the sudoers config so that now a password is required for root. If rejecting your password is new, then you may have forgotten or reset your root password, and you must to a reset of the root password per Reset lost root password - ArchWiki. GL

5

I don’t follow. I thought sudo will always prompt for the user’s password even under normal conditions? Please clarify.

6

After sudo visudo, you see:

## Uncomment to allow members of group wheel to execute any command
# %wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
## Same thing without a password
%wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

And comment out the second to avoid entering passwords for sudo. Sometimes, the included config (on the @includedir /etc/sudoers.d line) overrules your config … so that is one gotcha to look out for.

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