permission problem

I'm trying to set up a remote dedicated FreeBSD 5.2 RELEASE box for a game server. Somehow, I was trying to chmod the html directory so that any user can write and delete the files there without any problems when all of a sudden, I somehow locked my account and the admin (different from root) account out. Thinking back, I may have accidently did chmod –R 664 / by mistake when I meant ./ . I can log in with another account, but since I didn't add the account to the wheel group, I can't su. I can browse all the files just fine however with this account.

Now when I try to log in with either the admin or my account, the computer will automatically disconnect me. I know I somehow really screwed up all the permissions for all the files (php cannot write session files to /tmp anymore either). Is there any easy way to reset them to it original state? My webhost is going to try chmoding all the files to 755 in hopes that I can log back in as root.

I've not personally tried it, but apparently you can reset file permissions using the mtree utility against the files in /etc/mtree/ - a bit like a set of file permission templates. You'd need to find out more by reading the manpage for mtree and searching the freebsd-questions archive for references to mtree. Let us know how it goes, I'd be interested in knowing if you can solve the problem this way.

thanks a lot! i think the command beautifully :-)

i used the directions from URL

thanks for the tip-off

Great stuff :P