BRU PE Tape Import Tool won’t authenticate – “BRU PE Not Installed” – FALSE

[Patrick Rousseau]

I’m also having authentication problems with BRU PE. I have a mac pro (old tower version) that is still running El Capitan. However, I updated El Capitan to 10.11.6 (15G22010) and BRU PE stopped accepting the admin password when starting up.

I updated BRU PE itself, and it stopped asking for admin password upon starting up. I’ve been able to make backups no problem. However the first time I tried to do a restore, it failed saying “no valid sudoers sources found”.

I have spent the past 2 hours working on fixing my “sudoers” files, and apparently BRU has enabled itself to bypass the admin password (awesome, entering my admin password every time I start up was a pain in the butt, although I understand why it needed to do so.).

Ultimately I created an applescript file that changed the ownership of /etc/sudoers, /etc/sudoers.d, and /etc/sudoers.d/BRUExemptions to all be permissions 440. This got the restore to work, however it throws errors saying that it cannot modify the permissions of the files it is restoring.

At the moment, I’ve been able to successfully restore my files, but I fear that if I need to restore more than just a few files, it might fail (I read elsewhere that you can override how many permisssions problems it will allow before quitting?).

For those who want to replicate my applescript:
– open script editor (/Applications/Utilities)
– enter the following into the script:

do shell script “chown root:wheel /etc/sudoers; chmod 440 /etc/sudoers; chmod -N /etc/sudoers” with administrator privileges
do shell script “chown root:wheel /etc/sudoers.d; chmod 440 /etc/sudoers.d; chmod -N /etc/sudoers.d” with administrator privileges
do shell script “chown root:wheel /etc/sudoers.d/BRUExemptions; chmod 440 /etc/sudoers.d/BRUExemptions; chmod -N /etc/sudoers.d/BRUExemptions” with administrator privileges

– click “compile” in the script menu
– click “run” in the script menu
– Authenticate as admin in the system dialog

Then open and run BRU PE and hope it works for you like it did for me!

[Jim Curtis]

This is what fixed it for me when I was locked out on El Capitan, and then again after I upgraded to 10.13, and BRU PE stopped authenticating again.

Do this at your own risk. Results not guaranteed. I recommend cloning your disk before messing with sudo commands, just in case:

sudo mkdir /private/etc/sudoers.d

sudo chmod 755 /private/etc/sudoers.d

sudo cp ~/Downloads/BRUExemptions /private/etc/sudoers.d/

sudo -k

sudo bru -h

Jim Curtis
jamesphilipcurtis.com

MacPro 5,1; 6-core 3.06 GHz; 128 G RAM all the same brand; dual boot: 1011.6 & 10.12.6; QT 7.6.6; Primary display: 4K HP Dreamcolor; secondary: 24\” HP DreamColor; Nvidia TITAN GPU; ATTO R680 RAID5 16TB; ATTO H680 HBA for HP LTO5 tape; USB3 PCIe card; latest drivers all around

[Patrick Rousseau]

100% agree that when messing with sudo commands you should be very careful. It is very easy to mess up your OS and need to format your hard drive and reinstall everything (or restore from a cloned copy).

What I wrote above worked for me, it is definitely not a guaranteed fix. Good luck everybody!

Patrick Rousseau
Founder, Iris MediaWorks