More on "chmod -R 777 /*"
 

I know this has been asked (and answered) before. Here's a new turn:

I don't have physical access to the box but I do have webppliance running so I can upload and execute scripts on it. Obviously scripts are executed under non-root credentials.

At the moment my primary goal is to set /etc/ssh/* permissions so that I can ssh in and continue from there.

Question: Is there any way to change current user credentials in a script?

The things I tried:
"su" - needs stdin attached to tty so I can't feed it the password from a file
"sudo" - is not installed (and /var/* is 777 anyway)
"expect" - is not installed
"cron" - I can modify /etc/crontab but it refuses to execute tasks, old or new

Anything else to try?

Any help will be appreciated,
--andrew

Progress so far:

I replaced one of the startup scripts in /etc/rc.d/init.d with modified content and restarted the service from webppliance. The startup scripts are running under root so I was able to fix permissions on few select files in /etc and ~homedir/.ssh. Now ssh seems to be happy and thanks to most helpful folks here I fixed permissions on most critical system files. There's still a few left and that I'll be fine-combing manualy.

This site is a great resource for Linux newbees, thanks guys :)