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.
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.
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.
