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'chmod -R 777 /' destroyed all
Name: Six Date: April 8, 2003 at 21:26:08 Pacific OS: Slackware 9 CPU/Ram: 1.3 512
Comment:
I did a very dumb thing: chmod -R 777 / to my system (yes, bad idea I know) and now everything is broken. I cannot log in as root because I get a 'PAM-security: /etc/security file writable by everyone or is a regular file' or something along that. I cannot su to root as a normal user, it complains: "cannot setgid root" I cannot even startx because I get "Xfree must be started setuid root"
Can I somehow revert my permissions? Or what can I do to get it all going? I can use a boot CD like Knoppix if necessary.
Name: David Perry Date: April 9, 2003 at 04:43:33 Pacific
Reply:
Yes you are right. Assigning rwx to the world for your entire box was a dumb thing. There are good reasons for the restricted permissions. Easiest answer is to re-install as you have done major far reaching damage to the state of your machine. You could in theory boot from a rescue disk and change enough to get it to stop whining but that would not fix the rest of your system.
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grub/lilo don't work
