[SUMMARY] Permissions messed in /devices - easy fix?

From: Jim VandeVegt (vandevegt_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 09/01/05

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    Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2005 13:07:40 -0700 (PDT)
To: sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org

    -----
    Original Post:
    Due to an errant command during a security-tightening process, I have
    a Solaris 8 box that has had all of the Other Write bits turned off
    on the special files in /devices.

    Is there a reasonably easy method to get Solaris to regenerate
    /devices from scratch?

    I've tried "touch /reconfigure and reboot" - no dice - doesn't seem
    to regenerate something that's needed that's already there.

    Suggestion: how about nuking /devices and /dev from a script as the
    last thing the OS does on the way down then boot -r?

    -----

    IMHO the best responses came from Casper *** and David Foster to use
    pkgchk -f SUNWcsd
    to force the reinstallation (and presumably permissions) of the
    devices.

    Unfortunately, this advice came too late. What I did was
    touch /reconfigure
    rm -rf /dev /devices
    from single user mode
    init 0
    at which point the system locked.

    >From this point on the system would lock sometime shortly after
    reading /etc/system. I made many efforts to restore /devices to no
    avail after that point. Attempts included:
    *) disabled SVM - I could, after all, only really change one side of
    the mirror when booting from CD.
    *) boot from CD, copy /devices and /dev from the running image to the
    boot drive.
    *) boot from CD, use the suggested devfsadm -r /tmp/a method to
    rebuild the hierarchy.
    *) Last message I was getting looked like the system had loaded the
    RDAC driver for my SAN disks, so I disabled it.

    Basically got the same lock every boot attempt.

    Interestingly enough, on all these boot attempts where the 880
    locked, it would not even respond to BREAK on the ttya line (what I'm
    using for console). In all attempts I had to power cycle the box.

    The box is now back in production with a fresh new Solaris 9 load. It
    is something we probably should have started at Tuesday noon instead
    of Wednesday afternoon, but hindsight is always 20/20.

    Thanks for all replies.

    -----
    This would generally be my experience, from Grant:
    I would be careful about the /devices directory. I had to restore a
    system from backup, using NetBackup and the system wouldn't boot.
    After I rebuilt the system from a full backup, the system wouldn't
    boot. I even tried rebooting with -r and even touch /reconfigure.
    It turned out the /devices tree wasn't restored (NetBackup doesn't
    back up the /devices directory). The system would hang right after
    reading the system file. I finally had to boot from cdrom, run
    devfsadm on the mounted /a filesystem, and then rebooted. Then it
    booted. Hope this helps.
    -----
    >From Tim:
    Possibly a red herring, but wouldn't a
    sudo find /dev -name '*' -exec chmod o+w \;
    do the trick?
    Response: Yes, but Yes. Not everything should have write permission.
    -----
    Remove everything *except* for your boot device, rename
    /etc/path_to_inst then 'reboot -- -ra'. It'll ask you if you want to
    rebuild the path_to_inst
    Response: might have worked, but I didn't need path_to_inst rebuilt
    as far as I knew. As stated earlier, keeping the path to the boot
    device would have been useful.

    ---------------------------------

    Jim VandeVegt
    VandeVegt @t yahoo.com, Jim.VandeVegt @t PhysiciansMutual.com
    Eliminate the IRS and put the fair consumption tax in place. Visit http://www.fairtax.org/

                    
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