Question

You added a new administrator, jsmith, to the 'wheel' group with 'usermod -aG wheel jsmith' on a RHEL 9 system where wheel is granted sudo access via /etc/sudoers. jsmith is currently logged in via SSH but reports that 'sudo' commands still fail with a 'not in sudoers' error. What is the most likely reason and correct action?

Accepted Answer

The group change does not apply to jsmith's existing session; they must log out and back in (or start a new login session) to acquire the new group membership.

Answer

The usermod command replaced all of jsmith's groups; you must re-run it with the -G flag listing every group.

Answer

You must restart the sshd service so it re-reads /etc/group before the membership takes effect.

Answer

You must run 'systemctl restart sudo' to reload the sudoers database and apply the new group.