was network prob, now unknown prob: Now permissions prob

[James Takac]

On Saturday 15 September 2007 21:35:43 Les Gray wrote:
> On Saturday 15 September 2007 20:59:01 James Takac wrote:
> > Ok
> >
> > I believe I now know what caused my problem. Not creating a mount point
> > on the new drive and then changing permissions of the / (root) directory
> > is likely where I went wrong. I've booted into recovery mode and did
> >
> > chown root:root /etc/sudoers
> >
> > which has returned my ability to do admin tasks and reafirms in my mind
> > that I likely messed up the permissions when adding my new hard drive a
> > few days ago and is recoverable.
> >
> > I believe I may have inadvertently done the following
> >
> > sudo chown -R USERNAME:USERNAME /
> >
> > I think I messed up there. Would it put things right if I replaced
> > username with root? I'll do some more googling in the mean time just
> > incase I can get all the way
>
> Hi James,
>
> Running 'sudo chown -R USERNAME:USERNAME /' changes every file on your
> system to have owner and group 'USERNAME'. Putting 'root' in instead of
> 'USERNAME' means root will take ownership of everything.
>
> You want neither of these things to be the case.
>
> If this has already happened by the time you read this, then I'm sorry to
> say but you have one almighty mess on your hands.
>
> Do you have a partition image(s) of your hard drive? If so, then the
> easiest thing for you to do is to restore your system using these image(s),
> remembering to back up any files you want to keep to some other medium. You
> can change the permissions on this hopefully small number of files later,
> once you have your system back.
>
> If you don't have stored partition images, then a reinstall is the best
> (only?) option.
>
> I recommend a program called partimage for backing up disk partitions. You
> can get it (among other places) on the bootable 'System Rescue CD' -
> sysresccd.org .
>
> As you probably know, you should never have any cause to change the
> permissions of / . Using the '-R' option means the change is recursive ie.
> it includes every file and directory below / . In other words, your entire
> system. A definite no-no.
>
> If your new drive won't mount because of permission problems, all you need
> to do is change the permissions on the mount point. For example, you want
> to mount your disk on /media/newdrive. All you need to do is run 'sudo
> chmod 777 /media/newdrive'. This will make everything on that mount point
> readable/writable/executable by all users. If you are the only user this is
> not a problem. If there are other users you may want to adjust the
> permissions accordingly.
>
> HTH
>
> Les

Hi Les

Unfortunately I tried that which you said I don't want LOL
I do have 3 ubuntu based systems so I can compare if need.

The prob with the new drive is that I didn't exactly create a mount point, 
i.e. I just mounted its root partition. Oh well. Next time ;)

James