Lost Admin Privileges

[golinux]

I don't know why you keep posting here. The Debian folks know nothing of the backend *kit or other changes that were made in Devuan. They are summarized in the Release Notes.
Devuan != Debian and the divergence is greater with each release.

[rojasrod]

Garry Ricketson. I know this forum is allergic to expressions of humanity, but let me start with a big thank you.

Let's back up a little, when you mount this mysterious drive, How do you mount it ? , and To where do you mount it ?
Understood, one must either use "sudo", or be root to mount a drive or device. Obviously if root mounts the device, only root can read write to it, unless,...I am guessing on this a little, I am not sure about Devaun, or even Linux on this,...

Usually I open the file manager Thunar, and on the left pane I click on the drive, a pop up asks me for the encryption passphrase, another popup asks for admin password (maybe in reverse order?). Very easy

Does a normal user have permission to read write there ?,..

They have to have the admin password and encryption passphrase, so no.

since you say "it was stuck,while shutting down",... indicates something else may have been wrong, ... Why don't you try re-installing XFCE ? or for that matter, just reinstall Devuan , and use your backups, to restore you data ?



I installed OpenBsd, it is very well supported, it is NOT Linux, but it is much more "unix like", then any linux distro.
It is very secure, it also is very reliable. Like I said, we get power failures here, often, and I have never had any problems, even after a power failure, all though it sometimes takes some what longer to boot, when that happens,...

Thanks for the suggestion. I looked at OpenBSD in the past, but the installation process seemed daunting, also the full disk encryption process. I actually would really like to try it out, but I am very busy and can't afford days of messing around with the installation manual. Debian (Devuan also) has such an AMAZING installer, and it does the full disk encryption as well.

[GarryRicketson]

Your welcome,
Ok, I just woke up, and need some coffee, also have some chores, but I was thinking about this, and wonder :

Code: Select all

-I cannot mount certain drives unless I sign in as root 

You say "certain" drives, ? Can you elaborate on this ? Are these USB drives,
or ?, and then , what about other drives, ? Were these "certain drives", mounted /plugged in, when you tried to shut down, and "pulled the plug" ?
Do other drives, I am assuming these are USB drives or sticks, but do others
mount ok when you plug them in ?
I do use thunar as a file manager myself, but not the "root thunner",... however the encryption part also is something I do not know about,...
I have a couple of portable usb drives, that were damaged, and they are not encrypted, but anyway, similar to your situation, they sometimes can not be mounted, are not seen, other times they will mount, they won't boot, even though before the damage occurred they did. I have not been able to "repair" them, other then one, just yesterday, I wiped it, and installed OpenBsd to it, it now works great, boots well, and also mounts as expected.
Any way, I need some coffee and have some chores to do,...

[rojasrod]

You say "certain" drives, ? Can you elaborate on this ? Are these USB drives,
or ?,

No, actually this is an internal hard drive.
I have one small SSD for the OS and home, and then I have a large 3TB HDD for all the other crap that I don't need to access quite as often.
Both are encrypted, but the SSD decrypts at boot, whereas the HDD needs to be mounted and decrypted manually.

[GarryRicketson]

Ok , well I also wanted to add, I agree with golinux, I think it would be better for you to be asking about this on Devaun forum, they are more familiar with exactly how things are on Devuan,, ... also I notice here you say:

2) The thing is that I am not withholding information for sport. I don't even know which information is relevant, what is needed, etc...My apologies
The encryption used is luks but no lvm

At this point, while you can still at least access the drive as root, I strongly recommend , backing up all your data, now, not later, or "ok, but maybe I will try this first",... see this thread for more details:http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php? ... 02#p677992

Something went wrong when the PC was turned off, and not shut down properly, the LUKs encryption complicates things, something caused it to hang, and not shut down properly, there may be other things that start going wrong, the most important thing for you to do now is make a very good back up, that has all your important data on it. A back up of the entire system will not be any good, because it would be a back up of a broken system, but the data that is important or essential to you, that is what you need to get backed up,...
If anything goes wrong, while trying to fix the problem, and something more could go wrong, and perhaps it will not accept your password, and decrypt even as root, ...If you do manage to back up your important data, then if nothing else, it will be easy to re-install , if you feel Devaun is reliable, etc, and that is what you want, that is fine, .....

[Funkygoby]

Brutal powering off means that filesystems couldn't be unmounted and files may have been damaged.

One thing that I like to try when something is broken is to create a second fresh user to see if the problem is persistent.
If it isn't, then the problem is related to your user. Check your related config file in $HOME or purge them and start fresh.
If it is then the problem is system-wide.

That being said, your graphical shutdown/suspend/etc and sudo are not related.
Do you actually have a problem with sudo ?

Your graphical shutdown/suspend/etc being greyed out might be a problem with dbus, consolekit2, messagebus. On OpenBSD (yes... yet another OBSD user), you have to use a system-wide d-bus instance to solve this (very well documented). If I am not mistaken, Debian doesn't use them anymore (systemd instead).
This might be a good example as to why Debian folks cannot reliably help Devuan folks now.

[debiman]

I used to be able to launch certain applications that require superuser privileges from the GUI, and now they just won't unless I launch them manually from terminal with sudo (Gparted is one example)

this exact issue has been observed by others also, discussed here on the forums.
something to do with the util-linux package iirc.

[GarryRicketson]

https://gitlab.com/cryptsetup/cryptsetu ... d-question

6. Backup and Data Recovery


6.1 Why do I need Backup?


First, disks die. The rate for well-treated (!) disk is about 5% per
year, which is high enough to worry about. There is some indication
that this may be even worse for some SSDs. This applies both to LUKS
and plain dm-crypt partitions.

Second, for LUKS, if anything damages the LUKS header or the
key-stripe area then decrypting the LUKS device can become
impossible. This is a frequent occurrence. For example an
accidental format as FAT or some software overwriting the first
sector where it suspects a partition boot sector typically makes a
LUKS partition permanently inaccessible. See more below on LUKS
header damage.

So, data-backup in some form is non-optional. For LUKS, you may also
want to store a header backup in some secure location. This only
needs an update if you change passphrases.

The FAQ is very long, but detailed, I strongly suggest /recommend that anyone
using LUKS and cryptsetup, etc. read it, and the other documentation as well.
This should be done, before even deciding if you really want to use it, but in any event, if you do use it, it contains essential information on how to deal with this kind of problem.

Re: Lost Admin Privileges

Postby Funkygoby » 2018-08-01 11:25
Brutal powering off means that filesystems couldn't be unmounted and files may have been damaged.---- snip---

------ snip ------or some software overwriting the first
sector where it suspects a partition boot sector typically makes a
LUKS partition permanently inaccessible.