Doing some sysadmin on my wife's work computer. scp'ed some files from another machine - and put an extra space in the wrong place. No visible damage, except all of a sudden, all the commands stopped working in the "keithl" windows. I had an open root window (bad security, but it saved my ass this time) and I could run everything as root. I could even create some new xterms (as root) for experements. But when I tried to "su - keithl" I got:
Could not chdir to home directory /home/keithl: Permission denied /bin/bash: Permission denied YIKES! It is now three hours later, there are a lot of dents in the wall and in my forehead, and I found the "d-oh!" answer. It turns out that the borked scp had changed the permissions of "/" - the root directory itself - from 755 to 750 . Thus making the entire filesystem unreadable to anyone besides root. I changed it back to 755, and everything is back to expectations. Fortunately, I did not do too much irreversable damage while frobbing and fussing. So, kiddies, when this happens, do an "ll -ad /" and pay attention. Root is a directory, with permissions like everything else. If it ever gets set to 750, there goes user functionality. If it gets set to 777, there goes your security. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
