Re: changed ownership of / by mistake...

[Helge Hafting <helge.hafting@aitel.hist.no>]

Craig Hagerman wrote:

> Thanks for the replies Gilles and Cameron. I tried the suggestion to do
>
> apt-get --reinstall -u install
>
> and it does seem to have gotten things back ALMOST to where they
> should be. still a couple of obvious problems. I have no sound for
> some reason. I checked and things like /dev/audio0 ARE correct
> (root:audio) now. I get an errror message when I try to open the
> volume control and volume is greyed out on something like totem. Not
> really sure what might still be wrong to prevent audio from
> working....
>  
Ok, the device file has correct ownership.
Ownership of "/dev" and "/" is ok too?
How about the sounddriver module, probably in
/lib/modules/... somewhere?  Or the module loader,
/sbin/insmod or modprobe?

Use the "find" command to find files owned by craig outside of /home.
Then change them or reinstall the package.  Don't forget
directories not supposed to be owned by craig.

If "chown root:root *" fails, try "chown 0:0 *".   Looking up
names like "root" may very well fail on a hosed system,
numbers tend to work.  And root always has UID 0.

Make sure any suid binaries in /bin, /usr/sbin, and /usr/bin are all 
owned by root.
If they're owned by craig then they will switch uid to craig
when run, loose their privileges and then fail. . .

> The second thing I have noticed is that the terminal doesn't work. I
> CAN open up the terminal (gui), but there is an error message saying
> "cannon open child process", and the terminal itself is unusable.
> There is no prompt and I can't actually type anything in it. (Still
> going in by ssh from a remote machine.)
>
>  
Ownership of the xterm/gterm/kterm/rxvt binary is ok?
Check ownerships in /dev - nothing should be owned by craig, but
not all stuff is supposed to be owned by root:root either.  Consider
recreating /dev using makedev.


> Any ideas on these anyone?
>
> By the way Cameron, I did try knoppix, but since it is only a 32 bit
> OS I can't chroot into my existing filesystem. 
No need to chroot.  Just mount the fs under /mnt, then go into /mnt
and use chown to set ownership correctly.  Then umount the fs and reboot.

Helge Hafting