Why did my sudoers file suddenly reset itself?

Question

After setting up Wave in a Box on my Debian server, I started noticing strange things happening: I could no longer use sftp to transfer files, and even worse, I couldn't run any sudo commands! Thankfully, I could still su to root. When I checked /etc/sudoers, I found that it had been completely reset, with only the root user having sudoer permission.

I don't think my server was hacked, since I'm running denyhosts to shut out any attempts. Any idea what could have caused /etc/sudoers and /etc/ssh/sshd_config to reset themselves?

Answer 1

The Debian system cares so as not to mess up with your configs, but who knows? Did you recently upgrade your sudo (cat /var/log/apt/history.log)? Which version do you have installed? If you are running Debian Sid, you might have been adversely affected by an update to 1.7.4p4-6. The upload was meant to fix this bug.

Answer 2

This could happen if the packages were purged and reinstalled. Purging removes old config files and reinstall would bring you back to the default state.