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3.4.29.1587.pkg Install Failure Help


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After scanning through the end of your install.log, the root cause of failure is due to the "unable to stat /etc/sudoers: Permission denied" which means that the installer was unable to either find or read your sudoers file which contains a list of users with administrative permissions.

First, are you logged into an admin user account? If you are the only user on the computer, then you almost certainly are the admin.

Open the Terminal application (found in /Applications/Utilities) then copy and past the following followed by the Return key:

ls -l /private/etc|grep sudoers

Then copy and paste the response back here.

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Zerograves:~ ZeroGraves$ ls -l /private/etc|grep sudoers

-r--r-----   1 root        wheel    1276 Mar 23  2018 sudoers

drwxr-xr-x   2 root        wheel      68 Jul 30  2016 sudoers.d

-r--r-----   1 root        wheel    1563 Jul 30  2016 sudoers~orig

Zerograves:~ ZeroGraves$

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So that tells me that file is present and has the correct permissions to be read by root and group wheel. It also says something happened on March 23 to modify the original version that was there at the time. The sudoers~orig is probably an example file that came from an earlier OS that has been updated. It's unusual to see a current sudoers file that is smaller than the original. I have alway observed them to be larger when modified. If I had to guess at this point, I'd say that the portion that gives you admin permissions is missing for some reason.

There are three possible reasons why your sudoers file has been modified:
1) You are a programmer and command-line wizard and have made legitimate changes to the file.
2) You have installed some low-level system modification utility, such as an antivirus tool. Sometimes this file is modified by legitimate 3rd party software so that it can run with administrator, "super-user" privileges whenever it wants. However, this use is frowned upon. There are better and more secure ways to do this.
3) You have installed malware that has modified this file so that it can run with administrator, "super-user" privileges whenever it wants.

And here's the Terminal command you will need in order to read what is in yours:

cat /private/etc/sudoers

All of the lines that begin with a hash mark are remarks which are not acted upon. Only the lines that do not begin with # are important here. Normally there are only these two that are meaningful:

root ALL=(ALL) ALL
%admin  ALL=(ALL) ALL

Obviously, the second is the one that needs to be there for the installation to be successful.

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