a colleague was telling me back when he was a student sa for res, his manager
got the idea that world readable access to /etc was a security risk....

He also thought looking at atime was how to tell if his employees were
actually working, even after he had noatime set for (NFS) home dirs.

> Suddenly, all machines on the whole network crash, and they all become
> unbootable.   
>
> Root cause:  The old tarball didn't include the "etc" directory, so when it
> was extracted by root in a directory that didn't already contain etc, it was
> created, readable only by root.  The new tarball recursively included the
> "etc" directory with root read-only permissions.  By extracting the new
> tarball on all machines, the permissions of /etc were changed, readable only
> by root.  Hence all machines crash, and rebooting doesn't fix it.  Each
> machine must be manually logged into single-user mode, and chmod on /etc to
> fix the problem.
>
> AAAAAAUUUUUGGGGHHHH
>
-- 
Who: Lawrence K. Chen, P.Eng. - W0LKC - Senior Unix Systems Administrator
For: Enterprise Server Technologies (EST) -- & SafeZone Ally
Snail: Computing and Telecommunications Services (CTS)
Kansas State University, 109 East Stadium, Manhattan, KS 66506-3102
Phone: (785) 532-4916 - Fax: (785) 532-3515 - Email: [email protected]
Web: http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~lkchen - Where: 11 Hale Library

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