Hello all:

I have a couple of boxes located in New York, both running SunOS 5.6. I, unfortunately, am located in Pittsburgh and do not have console access to these boxes. A co-worker was attempting to build a user account in one of these boxes, and mistakenly did a: chown username *

What he did not realize was that he WAS NOT in the users home dir, but rather in /etc. He basically changed ownership of all files in /etc from root to username.

So, now I cannot log into the box remotely...I cannot rlogin from it's partner server, I cannot run rsh, resh, or rcmd from the partner server. Basically, I'm hosed.

Any ideas? I thought about doing a tape restore, but I cannot log in, obviously, to do that either.

Chris D.

You can't fix it remotely. Look in our faq section for the lost root password article. There are instructions on booting from a cd and mounting root. But instead of editing /mnt/etc/passwd, you will be doing a bunch of chowns.

Do I need Solaris 6 discs, or can I use 8 or 9??

-cd

Since you're only mounting root and doing some chown's, I would think that a later version of Solaris would work. I tend to avoid risk and thus I would strongly prefer to use 5.6 CD's. If that is not possible, I would go with what I have.

Suppose the coworker made some other errors? In the worst case, you will need to rebuild the boot disk. With no 5.6 CD's you will be forced to do a fast upgrade. Your tolerance for risk must be much high than mine.

You didn't mention what type of servers - check that they will boot a Solaris 8 or 9 cd...

I did locate 5.6 discs, and we have a guy flying up to the site tonight. Our plan of attack is to follow these instructions:

http://slacksite.com/technotes/fileperm.html


Anyone see anything wrong with using this procedure??



-cd