Moderators: I put this in the SUSE forum because that is what I am working with, but please feel free to move this thread into a more appropriate forum if you feel there is one that will get it better exposure for the advice I need.

I goobered my SUSE install badly when I tried to rearrange my partitions. Read all about it here.

I managed to use Norton Ghost to duplicate the corrupted Reiser partition to a USB drive enclosure that I keep around for just such emergencies. Then I deleted the corrupted partition and installed SUSE fresh into the empty space on the disk with a nice, big ReiserFS partition like I was shooting for in the first place. Then I logged in as root and copied the entire (well, most) contents of the partition on the USB drive OVER the new installation, then did an "upgrade" install from the SUSE CD's.

Things went pretty smoothly, all possibilities considered. My KDE installation is absurdly corrupt, so I simply removed it in its entirety (I am working in FVWM right now). When I am ready I will do a fresh install of the latest KDE from the online repositories.

In the meantime, all of the files I copied over belong to root! Yikes! This is creating some problems, as you can imagine, like the users not having write access to their home directories.

Is there any easy way for me to go through and straighten out the permissions on my file system? Maybe simply giving everyone full read/write access to the entire file system (probably a bad idea, but still a possible solution)?

Thoughts? Ideas?

TIA,

J

If this partition only contained the /home directories, then you can delete the contents of /home and recopy it using the -pR options. The -p option retains permissions. I'm not certain if using a Reiserfs, whether ACLs associated with the files are copied also. They are for ext3. However most likely you haven't set any using the setfacl command.

Sadly, this partition contains my ENTIRE FILE SYSTEM. It gets mounted as / ... I did manage to reset the permissions on the users home directories and have it recursively change the permissions of MOST of the subdirectories and their contents. Some things couldn't be changed, but I will work on that, along with the rest of the file system. Thanks, though, and keep the hints coming!

Read through the info pages for the rpm command. You may be able to verify the permission settings on individual files and directories using the rpm system.

Also, read through the root users mail. There may be a security program that reports changed permissions. Since the system is a clone with different permissions, you may have a list to work on.