I messed up permissions in home folder I can not login

Question

Some time ago I had this problem and I found a workaround by issuing following command

  sudo chmod 777 /dev/dri/card0

and leaving me with this bug.

I have been struggling to fix it for a week. Today I ran

  groups $USER

it printed

  kenn : www-data wheel

I thought that it would be a good idea to add current user into other groups, so I ran

  sudo usermod -G adm,disk,mail,cdrom,floppy,sudo,audio,dip,video,plugdev,fuse,lpadmin,netdev,sambashare,debian-tor,wireshark  kenn

I logged out and logged in but it did nothing. So I wanted to revert changes I made and deleted groups I added to current user by

   sudo usermod -G www-data,wheel  kenn

it supposedly reverted the change, I checked again

   groups $USER
   kenn : www-data wheel

But when I logged out I could not log in.

I logged in and opened terminal but now I can not run command with sudo

I get Sorry, user kenn is not allowed to execute '/usr/sbin/adduser as root on kenn

How can I revert changes I caused?

How can I add current user to adm and sudo groups?

EDIT: I managed to add myself to sudo and adm group from root account. And then ran

  sudo usermod -aG adm,disk,mail,cdrom,floppy,sudo,audio,dip,video,plugdev,fuse,lpadmin,netdev,sambashare,debian-tor,wireshark  kenn

But I don't know which more ones to add

I still dont understand what I did wrong.

It must be related to usermod -G switch instead of usermod -aG

id

returns

  uid=1000(kenn) gid=33(www-data) groups=33(www-data),4(adm),6(disk),8(mail),24(cdrom),25(floppy),27(sudo),29(audio),30(dip),44(video),46(plugdev),104(fuse),108(lpadmin),109(netdev),124(sambashare),129(debian-tor),148(wireshark),1010(wheel)

I need to know default groups that any admin account must have

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:24

Your home directory as well as the .Xauthority file both belong to your user kenn, however you've modified your user to belong only to www-data wheel.

My example (user is xieerqi ):

$ ls -ld /home/xieerqi
drwxr-xr-x 90 xieerqi xieerqi 16384 Dec 10 11:15 /home/xieerqi/

xieerqi:
$ ls -l .Xauthority                                                                           
-rw------- 1 xieerqi xieerqi 450 Dec 10 06:44 .Xauthority

What you need to do is to go into recovery mode (since you no longer belong to sudo group), enter root shell, remount filesystem with read write permissions (via mount -o rw,remount /), and run

usermod -a -G kenn,sudo,adm,dip,plugdev,lpadmin kenn

Additional info:

How do I boot into a root shell?

I messed up permissions in home folder I can not login

1 Answers1