Knowledge Base

sudo problem with defaults entries

I ran into a problem on my Ubuntu 16.04 Server LTS instance. Whenever a user (whether sssd-ad authenticated user, or local user, or root) uses sudo, it works. But it also sends the administrator a useless email:

host1.example.com : Jun  6 14:40:44 : root : problem with defaults entries ; TTY=pts/2 ; PWD=/root ;

I started removing the defaults entries in /etc/sudoers (using the visudo) command one by one, but after removing them all it still sent the annoying emails. Here are the defaults I was working from:

Defaults        env_reset
Defaults        mail_badpass
Defaults        secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"

How do I make sudo stop sending me useless emails?

This problem is caused by sudo looking for directives in a place it cannot find them: sss. Check the /etc/nsswitch.conf file and modify the sudoers entry.

sudoers:        files **sss**

The sss should not be there. The sssd-ad package adds itself there, but very few environments store sudoers directives in sss. It's far more likely your directives are local, so you should have a /etc/nsswitch file entry like the following:

sudoers:        files

References

A user of RHEL6 had the same issue. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=879633 The issue is solvable, including on Ubuntu 16.04 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sssd/+bug/1249777