file ownerships changed

[Chris St. Pierre]

This suggestion is a little out there, but it's worth a go.  SuSE
linux has a feature that periodically checks and, if necessary, resets
the permissions on various system files.  This is done according to
the specifications in /etc/permissions, which looks like this
(excerpted):

#
# /etc
#
/etc/lilo.conf                 root:root			600
/etc/passwd                    root:root			644
/etc/shadow                    root:shadow		640
/etc/init.d                    root:root			755

(That may look funky in some email clients; there are supposed to be
three columns.)  Each row specifies the name of a file, the owner and
group, and the permissions.  If you could get a SuSE permissions file
(email me off-list if you want one), you could write a quick script
that could reset the permissions of everything in the file.  My guess
is that the biggest differences you'd run into would be in which
system accounts did and didn't exist -- for instance, redhat doesn't
have a 'shadow' group, but SuSE does.  Still, with minimal effort you
could have a system that would at least be functional.  Or you could
hose it even worse, who knows? :)

Chris St. Pierre
Unix Systems Administrator
Nebraska Wesleyan University

On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Ed Wilts wrote:

>On Fri, Jul 01, 2005 at 04:40:05PM +0200, Martin Thoma wrote:
>> I just made a big mistake. I wanted to change to ownership of a 
>> directory and its subdirectories. I was to fast and typed a wrong 
>> regular expression so, that I changed the ownership of the files in the 
>> hole dir tree. Is there a way, to made that changes undo? I hope so, If 
>> not, what is the best to do now?
>
>Comment 1:  You can't undo.  The change has been made permanent and now
>you're up to try and fix what you've done.
>
>How to proceed depends on what you corrupted.  If it's /home, your
>fastest method would be to write a script that looks up the username in
>the passwd file and sets the ownership down from there.  
>
>If you can't guess who the original owners should have been and you
>really corrupted everything from / down, you're unfortunately better off
>restoring from your backups.  Make another backup first, restore the
>system, and then do an incremental comparison to see what needs to be
>restored, remembering of course that you don't want to restore the
>corrupted ownerships.  It's going to be ugly.
>
>If you have no backups, you're going to have a really bad weekend.
>
>-- 
>Ed Wilts, RHCE
>Mounds View, MN, USA
>mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
>Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program
>
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