RH 9 on a Thinkpad 600
There were some kppp processes that refused to die, couldn't even be killed by root
after user logout, so a reboot seemed prudent. On the reboot, It asked about a
filesystem integrity check, which failed and told me to fsck manually, which I did. I
got a few "short read" errors and cetera. Then as the reboot continued, there were
several messages about permission problems, including one or two involving ssh, then
gdm threw up an error message window about the permissions on /var/gdm and refused to
run. The root password wouldn't work (!?), but I got in on a user account. I couldn't
su root there either since the password wasn't being accepted. Then the root password
started working for no apparent reason, since I had changed nothing.
I did:
chmod -R 0750 /var/gdm
Then the X-login screen opened, and I got a KDE root session going. The only obvious
damage I have found is to the permissions on entire directories worth of files. For
example, all files in /etc/pam.d/ were set 777 instead of the normal 644. There are
many more waiting to be found. All the changes I have identified were changed to be
more lax, but not all were to 777.
Before I spend a lot of time tracking these things down and fixing them, or giving up
and reinstalling, I'd like to have some idea of what caused this. The shutdown before
the trouble was normal in all appearances, so the filesystem warning on the reboot was
completely unexpected. Obviously something happened that was beyond the scope of the
journalling system.
>>No user or root commands caused this damage.<<
The question is, what did?
Speculations, conjectures, and wild guesses are welcome.
--
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Carl Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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