[efreak]

I never had an issue with authentication. My issue was a typo in sudoers (I allowed a user to view syslog, iirc, and had a semicolon instead of a colon) that prevented me from using sudo, as only my primary user was allowed to log in via ssh. Fortunately cloud vps still has vnc login, and I actually had a root password. Now I use a root shell to edit sudoers, so I can test it before dropping root.

[Symbiote]

You should use "visudo", which opens the file in the default editor, then validates it before saving.

[pbhjpbhj]

But make sure to change the default editor to something sane first. (* ducks *)

:q!dammitwtf

[bigbizisverywyz]

+1 to that!

I like nano, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

[pnutjam]

if you edit outside of visudo, you can run visudo -cf <filename>.

example: visudo -cf /etc/sudoers visudoe -cf /etc/sudoers.d/extra