so, I guess the subject says it all.

I was trying to change the permissions of a folder but was one directory off from where i thought i was and ran:

chmod -R 755 *

in / as root. I seem to have fixed most of the related problems (ssh gets a bit snippy if you make your private keys public)

But have still encountered a couple problems that i can't quite trackdown. Mainly, i use eclipse (I'd post a link but it seems i'm just not cool enough for that yet) for programming and it works fine when i run it as root, but crashes when i run normal. this is the main problem i am trying to fix.

So, is there a quick and easy (perhaps as quick and easy as what caused the problem ?) fix to reset all my permissions back to default?

Dist: Redhat 9
Machine: Dell inspiron 2650

Thanks!

Perhaps you could use strace to see what it is trying to access.

man strace

"So, is there a quick and easy (perhaps as quick and easy as what caused the problem ?) fix to reset all my permissions back to default?"

Nope. The command line can be quite lethal.

eg.
cd /
ls /tmp/*
(nope, nothing here I want to keep)
rm -rf *
(oops...)

At least you didn't do anything that bad.

I think your only hope is a complete restore from backup, or barring that perhaps a reinstall (ouch).

yeah, i once did a rm -rfd * in the wrong directory. The sysadmin at school heard me yelling and told me about the backup directory that keeps a copy of every file we create on the school server. He looked at me funny when i tried to kiss him.

Linux conf checks a number of file permissions on exit. Maybe you should give it a go. Bastille also provides filesystem hardening, ie checks that the right permissions are set on the right things.

Granted, that won't be your defaults but should be good.

This is an uneducated attempt to solve the same problem. I couldn't log in as root or any other user after an idiot chmod operation on my root directory as root. My redhat 9 install disk and went into rescue mode. Then I did a chroot /mnt/sysimage followed by an su, just to be sure I had root priveleges (I'm shaking now.) I ran rpm -qa to see if rpm was querying ok. Then I ran rpm -qa |xargs rpm --setperms. This took about ten minutes to complete. Then I logged into my system successfully. There were still some problems with perms on files in my /tmp directory. So I did another uneducated thing and deleted the contents of /tmp. (Well, it sounded better than reinstalling.) There seem to be a few problems with the configuration files in my home directory, but everything is working now and my configurations are mostly preserved. My only problem encountered so far is with my mailer, evolution which I'm in the process of reinstalling now. Looks pretty. healthy otherwise. So how stupid am I?

Glen

"So how stupid am I?"

Not very, that sounds like a really smart recovery. That rpm --setperms trick is something I'll remember in case I ever need it. Thanks.

Just as an update, I'd like to confirm that the process that I described seems to have been successful. To straighten out my home directory issues, I did the following:

chmod -R u+rwX myhomedirectory
chmod -R go-rwx myhomedirectory

I figured I don't have many executables there, but the few that need executable perms can be set individually if/when the need arises. The only other thing I did by hand was to remove any group or other priveleges from my /etc/ssh/*key* files (chmod go-rwx /etc/ssh/*) This made ssh happy and I'm back to normal as far as I can tell.

Criticisms are welcome. If there is anything I've overlooked please tell me.

Try this as root.

$ for p in `rpm -qa --qf "%{name}\n"`; do rpm --setperms $p; done

Never had to do this myself but it may work.

EDIT:
I didn't see rpm -setperms before I posted. Anyway this will cover anything that's owned by a package but not a lot of files which aren't.

To find files that have the mode 755 on my RH9 system I did:

# rm -f ~/unowned-755-files.lst
# for f in `find / -xdev -type f -perm 755`; do rpm -qf $f >/dev/null 2>&1 || echo $f |tee -a ~/unowned-755-files.lst; done

For my RH9 system it only came up with 3 files in /etc excluding a whole lot of xml files in /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults that shouldn't have this mode. If you try this then do the for loop for each mount point like /usr etc.

Once you have the list of files then you'll have to analyse it manually to see if anything sticks out as having the mode 755 that shouldn't. You'd expect files in the bin directories to be that mode and in the lib directories but not much elsewhere.