I have a root server where I disabled login via user root and created another user that is in the sudoer list. So when I want to work on the server I do:
ssh myusername@IP_ADDRESS
On the server:
sudo su
enter my password to get root rights. This worked fine for 6 months now. Today I get this message when doing sudo su:
sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified
What the hack is happening? What does this error mean and why do I get it?? Without root rights I cannot do so much on the server. Any idea how to fix this?
sudo tries to open /dev/tty for read-write and prints that error if it fails. You've indicated in comments that /dev/tty is missing on your system.
Sudo has an option -S to read the password from standard input instead of /dev/tty. You should be able to run sudo -S to become root.
Regarding how to recover /dev/tty, It's possible that rebooting the server would be sufficient; the system might recreate all devices in /dev during bootup. Alternately, to create a device, you use the mknod command, but you need to know the correct major and minor numbers for the tty device. On an Ubuntu system I have available, I see these entries in /dev:
crw------- 1 root root 5, 1 Apr 16 18:36 console
crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 5, 2 Sep 24 15:35 ptmx
crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 5, 0 Sep 24 14:25 tty
In this case, the major number is 5 and the minor number is 0. /dev/console and /dev/ptmx have the same major number. So I'd inspect /dev/console or /dev/ptmx to find the correct major number, then run:
mknod /dev/tty c major 0
where "major" is the correct major number.
After recreating /dev/tty, make sure the permissions are correct:
chmod 666 /dev/tty