Question

Recovery console. Cannot do admin tasks

Posted on November 2, 2024
DigitalOcean Droplets
Asked by AndrewChalk

I have messed up in the recovery console (beginner’s error). I want to paste an SSH key into authorized_keys. I have modified the name of the admin to newadmin. That user cannot delete .ssh/authorized_keys and cannot go sudo because they are not in a file of users with sudo rights. Basically, I appear to have no admin user rights now!

How can I restore these rights without deleting my droplet. I have it up and running so I don’t want to do that. Thanks!

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alexdo

Site Moderator

• November 8, 2024

If you’re not logged in as root, you can try to switch to the root user with:

su

If you’re prompted for a password and you don’t know it, DigitalOcean may have temporarily reset it in recovery mode, or you may need to reboot into recovery mode and follow the process to reset the root password.

You can try to reset the droplet from snapshot or droplet as per Bobby’s suggestion.

Regards

Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• November 4, 2024

Hey!

In addition to what KFSys mentioned, another option here could be to try and restore from a backup before you made those changes:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/snapshots/how-to/create-and-restore-droplets

- Bobby

KFSys

Site Moderator

• November 3, 2024

Hey @andrewchalk,

Sadly, I’ve never seen that before. Are you sure you can’t access your root account? If you can’t, I’ll recommend you to reach out DigtalOcean support.