Used recursive chown on the root directory

Question

Im gonna need some help restoring my ssh settings as i screwed everything up by calling this command:

chown -R user /

At the moment im not able to access the site through ssh/ftp since the ownership of all the files have been changed. I dont want to reset every ownership but if i could get ssh working i would be able to create a backup of my files and then get a clean install of ubuntu on my server.

Here is the error that i get when im trying to restart ssh:

/var/run/sshd must be owned by root and not group or world-writable.

Im running ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Any help is very much appreciated.

P.S. I am able to run ssh commands on a browser based AJAX console that my hosting company (linode) provides.

Answer 1

You could just use chown again to make /var/run/ssh owned by the root. And I don't know much about Ubuntu, but couldn't you right click on the file in Nautilis (or whatever the file manager is called), and choose some option to change the permissions? Pablo Santa Cruz is right thought: this belongs on one of the sites he mentioned.