Securing my laptop
 

Hi all, i've just reinstalled and im planning on securing my laptop. I've already decided to chmod 711 most of the dir's in /* .

However if i did that for /dev/* would that mean i couldnt access my driver and/or DVD-RW as well? Im planning on leaving that one alone. Any suggestions are appreciated.

P.S. While i was editing my makefile i noticed the /media dir. Could that be what i dont want to deny access to?

Or could it be /cdrom that i should leave?

If I were you I would NOT change any directory permissions in / at all. You will most definitely encounter a lot of weird problems later. That is, if the system will be able to boot at all.
If you want a secure Linux machine, read on the SELinux project.

What if i went ahead and did what you said i shouldnt do before i saw your post :redface:

And everything went down the crapper, how would i go about restoring everything, seeing how root user has been some how 'deleted' =/

I don't know what you can do short of a clean reinstall. Sorry. Maybe. somebody else will have a better idea.

If you've just reinstalled (prior to changing things), it would be a way lot quicker to just do it again. I'm sure you can dig out all the relevant permissions, but it will take a long time, and they aren't all the same (so you can't just do a recursive change).