Trouble : I have mistakenly changed the user:owner permission of / how to recover

[mallinath]

Hi have LInux Redhat 2.1 enterprise installed on BLADE server.

Today I comitted a mistake of changing permission .

chown -R oracle:dba ..

I was in partition /usr02 where my software was to be installed
instead of chown -R oracle:dba .
I changed the whole system ownership to oracle:dba
anyway how to restore back the file ownerships and permission.

This server has just been finished installing OS .
if there is anyway to recover from installtion CD .
any pointers will be of immense help.

Thanks.

[dylunio]

Why don't you as root change the ownership back with

chown bob /usr02

wich will give ownership to bob, so replace bob with whoever was the owner before you make your mistake...

[mallinath]

The problem is how will I get information of each and every file / dirctorys specific owner:group info.
for eg in the /dev it has recursively replaced all the file dir owner to oraclea:dba .
and there are so many users eg. sys etc how to know/get list of the OS directories owners ..

[puntmuts]

You could do a forced reinstall of packages. It is probably faster then searching for the proper ownership of files and changing them. That will still leave you with files that did not come with the distro you use. Before you do make a backup of all your config files .

[l8forwork]

regain system control ...open a dir called today...dump everyones files into it open (no password etc) assign or let them open new user accounts and copy there own files from today dir. to there home NOTE :back up today just in case someone has a problem or is gone!

couple days kill today dir (your all ok!!!)

if server is on the net set no use flag to public no... read,write,etc


steve