Re: System broken with chown -R as root

From: Kill Bill (xbill_at_msn.com)
Date: 07/16/04 

Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 07:44:39 +0100

> some weeks ago I said inadvertently ' chown -R /* user1:user1 ' as root ; the
> seemingly affected dirs were /bin /boot /dev /etc ; terrified I made a full
> backup, then tried to repair with
>
> chown -R 0:0 /bin /boot /dev /etc
>
> and restarted. the system and its dialup connection seemed working. But
> yesterday I noticed that my HP670C printer doesnt work ; should depend on linux
> because the 'printing' menu entry in

It is okey to set both the user ownership and group ownership to root
for /bin, /boot, /etc, but it definately causes problem for /dev. Some
devices are meant to owned (or group-owned) by other users, say, the
interative login user. For example, the sound device, /dev/dsp may be
owned by the login user (or group-owned by the login user or some sound
user group, with group-writable bit set), otherwise sound won't work.
Similiarly /dev/lp* should be group-owned by lp and are group-writable,
otherwise lp[r] won't work.

HTH,

Kill Bill 

--
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