Re: Ahhh, which reminds me of this gem
@ Anonymous South African Coward
We had an Ubuntu server (office use only - mainly document and software repository, but I also used it as our main WPKG server whilst I was building a distributed WPKG server setup for a major client) that all of a sudden refused ssh logons. It was still working perfectly in the morning, but sometime during the afternoon it point blank refused all ssh sessions.
I went to a colleague of mine and asked him if he knew what had happened, or if he had changed something, he said no - it is still working fine (he was logged in through an ssh session). I explained what my problem was and, to demonstrate that all was fine, he logged out and then logged right back in, except that he could not.
I then connected a monitor and keyboard to the server to sort it out, but it also refused local logons, saying permission denied. Rebooting in single user mode also did not help - I could not access any command (thinking that he somehow changed all the passwords or deleted/corrupted the password file).
It turned out that all that he had done was to clean up our repositories, as it had become a bit tatty, with duplicate documents and folders in the wrong place, etc (since I was the only one using a linux machine, the others being Windows, access was via SAMBA shares). Luckily that was still accessible and writeable.
Further probing revealed that he had decided to change permissions in the document repository to 777, as there apparently were problems with some documents having incorrect permissions, preventing other users from opening or editing certain documents.
So I very gently asked him in which folder he was when he changed it, and he said that he double-checked that he was in the correct folder. I then asked him what exactly he had typed, and he said "chmod -R 777 /*, of course".
Then the penny dropped: working mostly in Windows, he had forgotten that / means root - he had changed permissions on all files on the machine! (For those of you unfamiliar with linux/unix - it does not take kindly to such abuse).
Another anonymous South African in order to protect the guilty.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
