For some reason I keep getting this error when trying to run a sudo command eg:

sudo -u someuser somecommand

sudo: Error dropping capabilities, aborting

My version of sudo is: sudo-1.6.9p17-3.el5_3.1 and I've heard that version 1.7 fixes everything.  The only thing is yum does not think sudo has any update.  I guess the new version has not been committed to the RPM repository yet.

This is really a huge and annoying bug, imagine if you have a backup script or something else that depends on sudo.   I should add that this is an OpenVZ container it's happening on, I am not sure if that is part of the issue.

This is obviously a bug with sudo and hopefully the error will be fixed soon with a new version/update of sudo by the Centos team.

Solution

(it seems that some have said this is because the OpenVZ host does not have auditing in the kernel, it still seems that the sudo maintainers should be able to avoid this bug if it detects no audit capabilities though).

 wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.3/os/SRPMS/sudo-1.6.9p17-3.el5.src.rpm

 rpm -ivh sudo-1.6.9p17-3.el5.src.rpm

error: cannot create %sourcedir /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

mkdir -p /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES
rpm -ivh sudo-1.6.9p17-3.el5.src.rpm

vi /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/sudo.spec

Replace:

BuildRequires: audit-libs-devel libcap-devel

with

BuildRequires: libcap-devel

Change "--with-ldap" to "--with-ldap \" and add below it:
--without-audit


For these steps you need the "rpm-build" package.  Install it if you don't have the binary "rpmbuild" already.


rpmbuild -bb /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/sudo.spec

You'll get these errors unless you have the other required packages:

error: Failed build dependencies:
        pam-devel is needed by sudo-1.6.9p17-3.i386
        openldap-devel is needed by sudo-1.6.9p17-3.i386
        flex is needed by sudo-1.6.9p17-3.i386
        bison is needed by sudo-1.6.9p17-3.i386
        automake is needed by sudo-1.6.9p17-3.i386
        autoconf is needed by sudo-1.6.9p17-3.i386
        libtool is needed by sudo-1.6.9p17-3.i386
        libcap-devel is needed by sudo-1.6.9p17-3.i386

yum install pam-devel openldap-devel flex bison automake autoconf libtool libcap-devel


Try again:

rpmbuild -bb /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/sudo.spec

Install new/updated sudo package:

rpm -Uvh --force /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/sudo-1.6.9p17-3.i386.rpm


Now sudo away :)