Restoring the owners on debian system files

Question

Due to my inattention, tiredness (and probably stupidity) i've run "chown -R someuser:someuser /" and now all your base are belongs to us the files on the server belong to one user (lol).

After system restart, apache, bind9, mysql, and a dozen other applications don't start and fill their log files with permission errors.

I haven't done any backups on system files, only on the db and website files.

Please suggest some ways to revive my web server. I have only 2 month experience with linux, so please keep it simple.

Answer 1

There is no magic solution for problems like this (but backups). You should make one now before more goes wrong.

The simplest possible solution to work your way out of this mess is probably

• make a backup

• reinstall all installed packages with (check man dpkg and man aptitude)

  aptitude reinstall $(dpkg --get-selections)
  

• find out what (config) files where modified in your old install with some recursive diff tool available to you (this one seems to make sense). Copy changed files from your backup to your new install. The database files should still be there after a reinstall.

If all that sounds too complicated to you, you could think to just reinstall anything that complains (apache2, bind9, mysql, ...), but that way a lot of things will still be severly broken without you noticing.

Did I say that you should make a backup?