restoring default ownerships/permissions: was networking prob

[Mario Vukelic]

On Sat, 2007-09-15 at 22:18 +1000, James Takac wrote:
> sudo chown -R USERNAME:USERNAME /
> 
> however I thought maybe trying to return the root partion to root
> ownship and perissions,  i.e. the above but root in place of username
> which appears to have meseed it up a lil further

No, this will not return really the system to a usable state. Many
directories and files are not owned by root, for example
in /dev, /etc, /var, and elsewhere. Using a bit of command line magic,
you may be able to create a list of permissions on one of the working
machines, and apply it automatically to the broken one. Or do it
manually ...

Possibly reinstalling all packages helps, but that's just a wild guess.