[wellylug] ubuntu access problem

[David Antliff]

On 19/02/2008, Rob Collins <robcollins55 at aim.com> wrote:
>  One problem though, for some mysterious reason, read access to root folders
> is now disabled for all users unless i use sudo.

Hi Rob,

I doubt that has anything to do with the change to Gnome or gdm. On
the face of it, it sounds like something (badly written script, badly
constructed package, badly typed command) has changed your file
ownership and/or permissions in a bad way. If you are lucky, then only
the root directories have been affected. If it's been done recursively
to your entire tree...

Well, unfortunately, if this is the case, then this is going to be
really difficult to fix because there's no clear history of what it
should be.

Perhaps you could send us the output of these commands.

List the permissions of your root directory:
$ ls -l /

Then, as root, go into a directory like /boot or /usr and see if the
permissions are screwed up in there too, e.g.:

$ sudo ls -l /boot


In my opinion, if all your subdirectories are affected too, I would
back everything up, do a full re-installation, and restore selected
configuration files and home directory contents.

There may be a way to forcefully reinstall all packages again, without
removal, to force them to fix file permissions, but I'm not sure if
this will fix all of your problems.

Hopefully it's just the root directory that is affected.

-- 
David.