Hi all, I am in need of some BIG help. I am an idiot! I did something stupid on my home server. I wanted to change the owner and group of all the files within a folder to myself (craig). I was already in directory /mnt/sda/ (logged in as root) and I entered:
# chown -R craig:craig /* instead of # chown -R craig:craig ./* I realized this right after but wasn't sure how to undo what I had done. when I checked out # ls -l / sure enough everything showed up as craig:craig. Tonight I tried to see what had happened and tried to su to root and got an error message saying I couldn't do that. (I can log in as root remotely via ssh still.) I figured this had to do with the BIG change of ownership. I figured that I should try to change everything to owner root as a start. But for some reason # chown root /* DOESN'T work! (note - I was logged in as root when I tried this). I tried to change just a single directly(/etc), or a single file (/bin/su)... with the same result. I enter # chown root /etc or # chown root:root /etc/ and it returns without error, but with no changes made. I also tried changing some files to staff group .... only to be told this group does not exist. It always did before and it is still there in /etc/groups. hmmm.... I restarted, and now X doesn't work properly. X does load and starts up gnome, but it fails at some point. I get a terminal in the corner, I can move the mouse and click on an error mesage, but I can't use that terminal, and no other gui elements show up (task bar etc). I tried booting into a live CD of Ubuntu amd64 and then repairing things via a chroot - but that won't let me change ownership either. I tried to do something like this: # mv /etc /etcOLD # cp -R /etcOLD /etc Which DID give result in ownership:group being root:root. But the gui system is still unusable. NOTE- the underlying system seems to work. I can use a shell (CMD-ALT-F2) and I can log in via ssh.) WHAT I WANT-------> Can anyone suggest how I might be able to fix all the screwing up I have done? Is there anyone to put permissions and ownership back the way it "should" be? On my mac computer there is an option to "repair permissions" which I would love to have on Linux but don't think it exists. Any help at all would be MUCH appreciated. Craig Hagerman
