Possible reasons for SUSE Manager to report "Access denied to UID postgres via sudo."

This document (7023801) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Manager 3.2

Situation

This error message has been observed in the following situations:

1. Running smdba returns:

susemanager:/root/ #smdba system-check autotuning --max_connections=400
Cannot parse line: root is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Backend error:
Access denied to UID "postgres" via sudo.

2. When migrating from PostgreSQL 9.6 to PostgreSQL 10 using /usr/lib/susemanager/bin/pg-migrate-96-to-10.sh, the script may exit with:

09:32:13 Tune new postgresql configuration...
Backend error:
Access denied to UID "postgres" via sudo.

While monitoring the execution of smdba system-check autotuning --max_connection=400, the following errors are observed in strace:

25100 write(2, ">>> /etc/sudoers: Alias \"CONFIG_RHN\" already defined near line 90 <<<\n", 70) = 70
25100 write(2, "parse error in /etc/sudoers near line 90", 40 <unfinished ...>

Resolution

Please compare /etc/sudoers and /etc/sudoers.d/spacewalk for duplicate entries. The options activated in /etc/sudoers.d/spacewalk must not exist in /etc/sudoers.

This issue will most likely only occur on older SUSE Manager deployments (installed before spacewalk-config-2.8.5.4-3.7.1).

Cause

Additional Information

SUSE Manager patch advisory:
https://www.suse.com/de-de/support/update/announcement/2018/suse-ru-20182874-1/

[...]
Fix /etc/sudoers.d/spacewalk file. (related to bsc#1099517) NOTE: In case there have been custom modifications to this file, it will be saved in /root/sudoers-spacewalk.save as sudo will fail on duplicate definitions

[...]

strace command to capture system calls for analysis:

strace -f -s 1024 -o /root/smdba.strace smdba system-check autotuning --max_connections=400

Disclaimer

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