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Root set to permission 771 - need help!!

Posted on June 21, 2014

Root was set to permission 771 using the command

sudo chmod -R 771 /

Well this let go a long list of “… cannot change permission” errors before just kicking me out. I now can no longer long into the server with my root or user accounts.

I get the following error

“OpenSSH_6.2p2, OSSLShim 0.9.8r 8 Dec 2011 ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host”

Very Very stupid and was a mistake – I’m also very new to this (3 days) but had a lot of progress in setting up my sites. Now those are a 404 error.

From my (very) limited understanding on how permissions work, I think I blocked access from myself to the whole server and thus can’t log in - but not sure if that’s the issue.

Any solutions? I really would hate to loose all the work I’ve done. I will also start backing things up (but there are no backups sadly)… ugh terrible day.



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Can you attempt to log in from the web console on the DO panel?

Honestly as I’ve never been down this road I can’t even fathom an estimate. We have to assume we have no idea how mny permissions are now broken and the machine should be viewed as insecure and/or high liabiliy… Resetting manual permissions to the correct perams will take much longer than scratching and restarting.

I see what you’re saying… man. I guess this is a hard lesson to learn. So I can get into the console through DO — is there anyway from there to download my files, the nginx files (config & site-available files), and export my databases?

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