A customer called and wanted help with an error they made.
The error was simple, they typed:
chmod -R 660 /
and now things broke. Of course things broke. If they would not brake that would be very weird.
Luckily they had a second server and a simple one-liner stole all the rights from this second server and and we could put these on the broken one.
The oneliner
find / -depth -printf 'chmod %m\t\t-- "%p"\nchown %u:%g\t-- "%p"\n' > rights.sh
produces output like this
chmod 644 -- "/etc/sysconfig/kdump"
chown root:root -- "/etc/sysconfig/kdump"
chmod 644 -- "/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources"
chown root:root -- "/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources"
chmod 644 -- "/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources.rpmforge.txt"
chown root:root -- "/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources.rpmforge.txt"
Running this script on the broken server left us with something that was working.
Running
dpkg -x <package name>
on all cached packages in /var/cache and after that a
dpkg --reconfigure -a
Solved the rest.
Pheeeuuwww, we were lucky :-)