Cannot go into Root

Question

When I enter sudo su or sudo -i in terminal on Ubuntu 12.04, I cannot become superuser. When I enter the password nothing happens. Its like:

user@host~: sudo -i
enter passwd: ******
user@host~: nothing happened

And then:

user@host~: sudo -s
root@user~: WTF?

Instead when my normal user enters sudo -s it becomes root. Wtf...?

Answer 1

It seems you wrong default shell setup for the root user.

• In 1st command sudo -i, you passed the login authentication but no shell run.
• In 2nd command sudo -s, you are already passed sudo authentication which it you are only asked onces per terminal (may be it has a timeout period). However this time, it loads directly /bin/bash not shell set in the root profile.

To test this theory run:

sudo -i /bin/bash

Related: 'sudo su -' vs 'sudo -i' vs 'sudo /bin/bash' - when does it matter which is used, or does it matter at all?