Strange LDAP & Sudo Problem

10 Jul 2009 in Systems administration on Gentoo, Linux, Ldap, Sudo, Systems administration

After several updates of various systems software packages on my Gentoo Linux servers, I began to notice a problem where I was being denied sudo access. The solution was amazingly simple, once I actually Googled to figure out what was going on. To my surprise, a log entry was actually being generated which indicated what the problem was:

Jul 10 16:39:17 confluence1 sudo: pam_unix(sudo:auth): authentication failure; logname=neraath uid=0 euid=0 tty=/dev/pts/1 ruser= rhost=  user=neraath

Thanks to this wonderful listserv post, I finally was able to resolve the issue by adding the sudoers: ldap line to my /etc/nsswitch.conf file.