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2006-06-02

sudo issues

While testing linux to linux nxclient with my coworker andy Mei, a rogue line was accidentally pasted to /etc/hosts just before we saved & exit.

It was something like this
192.168.1.1 myubuntu.scorion.net192.168.1.1 myubuntu.scorion.net192.168.1.1 myubuntu.scorion.net192.168.1.1 myubuntu.scorion.net192.168.1.1 myubuntu.scorion.net192.168.1.1 myubuntu.scorion.net192.168.1.1 myubuntu.scorion.net192.168.1.1 myubuntu.scorion.net192.168.1.1 myubuntu.scorion.net192.168.1.1 myubuntu.scorion.net192.168.1.1 myubuntu.scorion.net192.168.1.1 myubuntu.scorion.net192.168.1.1 myubuntu.scorion.net192.168.1.1 myubuntu.scorion.net...

That caused some grief! It broke sudo. So everytime I typed `sudo ...` I would get an error:
sudo: unable to lookup via gethostbyname()

I was not able to sudo and therefore I was not able to correct /etc/hosts. So, I rebooted (I could not `sudo reboot` but I could reboot from GUI) to login in Recovery Mode.

As luck would have it, I ran into another issue. I was always getting "keyboard error" while system was booting up but it would be fine after GUI came up. So, I never paid attention to it.

To fix the issue, I connected my keyboard to a different usb port (but this time at the back of my dell pc) and then I was able to login in Recovery Mode as root. Once the offending entry was deleted, everything was back to normal.

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