[ale] Shoot! I really screwed it up now!

James P. Kinney III jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Thu Jul 25 15:42:15 EDT 2002


Let me reiterate my previous  "don't know". There is no "easy, ready to
run process".

If you have an RPM based box, you may be in better shape that I
previously thought. The following stuff will help:

for i in `rpm -qa` do
rpm -ql --dump $i > files.txt
done
will output a list of all files in rpm --dump format. The files.txt will
be in the following order:

path size mtime md5sum mode owner group isconfig isdoc rdev symlink

according to the rpm database.

Now some scripting to extract out the owner, group and path to reset the
permission, and all is well. Except, of course if you have changed
things since the install. It also will not correct for non-rpm packages.

#!/usr/bin/perl;
use strict;

my ( $dumpfile, $path, $size, $mtime, $md5sum, $mode, $owner, $group,
@stuff);
$dumpfile="files.txt";
open (IN, "<$dumpfile") || die "Failed to open $dumpfile, $!";
while <IN> {
($path, $size, $mtime, $md5sum, $mode, $owner, $group, @stuff)=split
(/\s/, $_);
system(chown $owner:$group $path);
}


Any improvements offered by Fletch should be immediately incorporated. I
have not tested this at all. It was merely written in my mail window.

On Thu, 2002-07-25 at 15:13, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> This is the time to pull out those excellent backups you've been making.
> 
> I don't know of anything that will restore the permissions for an entire
> drive. You can do it manually as root. 
> 
> At this point, the fastest way to recovery may be to do some data
> backups now (/etc, /home, /usr/local, /opt, /var/www, /var/spool/mail,
> ...) and then a new install followed by a restore of the backups then
> manually fix the permissions on the restored stuff.
> 
> ouch! That's not as bad as rm. It could be worse. 
> 
> On Thu, 2002-07-25 at 14:37, Gary MacKay wrote:
> > How do I fix the permissions on the entire drive? I was in the root 
> > directory and wanted to change a couple of .xxx files ownership. I 
> > issued a "chown root:root .*" command and promptly watched it change the 
> > entire drive. Why did it do that? At the most id should have done /root/ 
> > and whatever was under it, not the whole frigging drive!
> > 
> > I presume I'm just hosed royally right?
> > 
> > - Gary
> > 
> > 
> > ---
> > This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
> > See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
> > sent to listmaster at ale dot org.
> -- 
> James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
> President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
> Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
> 770-493-8244             \.___________________________./
> 
> GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
> <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
> Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 
> 
> 
-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 



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