First of all, I want to mention that I am running Manjaro Linux. Today when I wanted to install a new program I got the following error when trying to use sudo pacman:
sudo: account validation failure, is your account locked?
I googled around a bit and found a few possible causes of this issue, but none of the solutions I found seemed to fix my problem. What I tried so far:
- booting with init=/bin/su and running /usr/bin/passwd
- using chage to check the expiration dates of root and my user account
Another thing which might be important to mention is that I used to authenticate for sudo by using my fingerprint reader. I used fprintd to do this. I thought this might have been the reason for the error so i removed fprintd as well, however this did not resolve the issue. Does anyone have a clue of how I can fix this?
Best Answer
I fixed it by logging in as root by using:
su -After which I examined /etc/pam.d/sudo and saw that my file looked different from the standard file (e.g. it still had some variable which had to do with my fingerprint reader in it). I changed it to look exactly like the default after which sudo worked again!