When doing a fresh installation from CD, people get

“visudo: you don’t exist in the passwd database”

in the build of the sudoers file in /etc/nixos/nixos/etc/default.nix. This is probably because /etc/passwd hasn’t been initialised yet.

Fix:

• remove the check from visudo (risky, but shouldn’t really matter)
• initialise /etc/passwd (taking care not to mess up existing accounts)

Submitted on 10 October 2007 at 15:40