Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Repairing file permissions: pkgchk -f

I was recently testing a process for repartitioning root disks which requires booting on an alternate disk, then copying and restoring data to the primary disk. I used ufsdump for this because of its excellent handling of some of UFS' nuances. The downside is that if you don't use ufsrestore frequently, you will be asked a nonintuitive question at the end of the operation. Yes, yes, a quick trip to the man pages would have helped. Unfortunately, I was being a bit cavalier at the time, and since it was a lab machine I thought little of it.

Turns out I should have thought a little harder. I ended up restoring data wonderfully, but pretty much toasted the system because all files were owned by root, with group other. Good in some places, not so good in others. Prognosis: rejump the server? Naah.

Sun published a Blueprint way back in 1999 which I think all system administrators should read. Someday this information will save your butt. Repairing File Ownership and Mode by Richard Elling.

I had forgotten about the "-f" option to pkgchk, which is described in this document. This option will attempt to correct any file system attributes such that they align with the registry's entries. This won't help things outside the OS, but it will restore sanity to an OS full of toasted attributes. The recommendation is to boot CD-ROM or network, then mount the root file system on /a, and run a pkgchk -R /a -f. I found that simply booting single-user and running pkgchk -f did the trick. Your mileage may vary.

I don't think there would have been any other practical approach short of re-jumping the box to restore all of the lost attributes, so it is with great enthusiasm that I recommend keeping "pkgchk -f" in your tool bag.

1 comment:

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