Can i fix the permissions?

elsenator · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Jan 2005 Posts: 89

Ok, my ears are quite a bit red right now. I made a huge mistake while fiddling with my Gentoo based server. I accidentally executed "chown -R [user]:users" in "/"(don't ask me how, I'm too embarrassed to answer that

) which, basically ruined the entire thing. I tried doing a "chown -R root:root" afterwards to see if it would fix things, but to my dismay the system seems to be acting really really weird.

So, i was wondering if there is a simple solution to this? Can i somehow apply a permission scheme to the system files to change them back into normal? The user dirs are, of course, easy to fix, but what about the rest?

justwantstohelp · Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 7:20 pm Post subject:

I'm sorry to say that such a thing is all but impossible. You're better off re-installing.
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erik258 · Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 7:20 pm Post subject:

well, i did the same thing once with /var and had to change everything manuallly. I suppose you could write a script to change everything automatically, but then you'd need to run it on a working computer with (mostly) the same files as you and get a list of permissions to set for each file on your fs.

for portage it would be easier to grab a new snapshot and reinstall portage. you'll loose your distfiles /usr/portage/distfiles though, you may want to backup that directory and change the permissions on the files in it manually.

i think someone once did this and i tried to help them, but they were set on reinstalling ... let's see if it's in my post history ... nope, guess they clear that out after a few months. too bad.

anyway i will happily help you get that list of appropriate permissions, but i'm not much for shell scripting.
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elsenator · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Jan 2005 Posts: 89

Thanks for your replies. I'm heading for a reinstall then :/ Oh well, at least i learned not to type so friggin' fast while working as root.

erik258 · Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 7:28 pm Post subject:

are you dead set on giving up? i still think you could bring your system back to life, but it would require a bash srcipt or two.
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timeBandit · Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 7:29 pm Post subject:

Ownership is harder to correct than permissions, but this thread covers a similar situation. If emerge works you won't need to reinstall from scratch, but you will need to rebuild everything to restore all the owners and permissions.

erik258 · Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 7:48 pm Post subject:

thanks dude, i finally found that topic.

here's a link, if you want to see the progress i made there. the script generates commands to set permissions properly.
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-449348-highlight-.html
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elsenator · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Jan 2005 Posts: 89

Thanks all

I appreciate your suggestions. I don't usually go with the easy way in situations like this, but since it was quite urgent, i had to find a quick and easy way to get the system up and running again, so i ended up installing Xubuntu. Buuuut, Gentoo is still running on my other two machines.