Hi,

after messing up my partition table quite badly and barely being able to rescue most of the /var data, I am facing the problem of wrong permissions and ownership. Well, this currently results in X failing to display any text (at least for most fonts), and several servers refusing to start up.
So, is there any way to restore the permissions of /var, at least for vital components? I am running a mostly up-to-date Debian Testing desktop system, getting some scripts from the net is not a problem.

Would a simple reconfigure of the respective packages do? I am fed up with random stabbing and producing more and more problems, which is why I figured I should ask this time

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
David

I'm not running debian or any servers, just a desktop, but every subdirectory in my /var except a man page subdirectory has a root owner and group with 755 permissions(owner has rwx with all others having rw-). You can apccompolish that with:

# chown -R root:root /var
# chmod -R 755 /var

The man page subdirectory, /var/catman, has a root owner and belongs to group "man" with both owner and group having rwx pwrmissions and others having only rw permissions which would be 775 permissions. T get that do:

# chown -R root:man /var/catman
# chmod -R 775 /var/catman

That's at least a start. However, some files in the /var subdirs are only readable by root on my system, particularly certain log files. Having them world readable may have security ramifications but everything should at least work and you can tweak those permissions later. Also, some subdirs of the /var subdirs have different ownership/permissions particularly in /var/lib. What you really need is the output of this:

# ls -alR /var

from someone running a similar version of debian. That will printout the full ownership/group/permissions of every file in /var. From that you can make a meaningful comparison. You may want to make that request in the debian forum.