[ubuntu-za] NETBOOK CRASH

[Jonathan Groll]

On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 10:07:41AM +0200, vincent wrote:
>On Wed, 2010-09-22 at 12:30 +0200, Jonathan Groll wrote: 
>> On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 11:40:01AM +0200, vincent wrote:
>
>> Are you really sure you only fiddled with files that fall under your
>> home directory and were owned by your regular desktop user? Did you
>> have to sudo in order to do the chown?
>Yes,I used sudo to chown because 10.04 on the desktop had placed a lock
>on them and needed to change owner to do this. 
>> 
>> I have a hunch that something is wrong in /the keyopt backup file var, like this situation:
>> http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/fedora-35/problem-with-var-lib-gdm-iceauthority-file-711867/
>> 
>> So, do you recall changing anything under /var ?
>You're absolutely right regarding this problem because 10.04 on the
>desktop always places a lock on backup files in/var/backup, something
>8.04 never did and in order to burn backups to a disk I have to change
>ownership or Brassero can't burn.
>However in this instance I didn't chown var/backup, or anything in var
>as the keyopt files were stored directly on the flash drive.
>So I'm pretty sure that no system files were touched. 

 From reading the results of the ls -al /var and for the
subdirectories, the owner of the files in /var seems to have been
changed recursively to be 'vincent'. In order to fix, unfortunately,
it is not as simple as recursively changing the owner of the files
back to being root as many of the subdirectories/files should be owned
by users other than root (for example /var/cache/man should be owned
man:root, /var/run/dbus should be owned messagebus:messagebus;
/var/log/auth.log should be owned syslog:adm; the list goes on and
on).

For reference, I've put a recursive ls -alR of my /var directory up
at: http://www.bloggroll.com/stat/var_for_vincent.txt

As you'll see, the file ownership differs to what was presented in the
attached files, the majority of the files are not owned by my regular
'jonathan' user.

If it was a case of simply fixing the file ownership in /var I would
say that it might be possible but it would take you a few hours.
However, I think the problem might be wider than that, the 'sudo' file
presented also had different ownership to mine:

-rwsr-xr-x 2 root root 148024 2010-08-31 22:40 /usr/bin/sudo

So, possibly all the system files under /usr or even from the root
folder of / may also be owned incorrectly. I would recommend
reinstalling, as the clear solution would be to reinstall every
package on the system. A reinstall would be the quickest way to get
back to a clean system. Unless anyone else has a better idea, like
perhaps upgrading directly to 10.10??

Cheers,
Jonathan