oops, chmod and chown BIG errors. no sudo?!

[FarmCretin]

i think i made a BIG booboo, i was messing with chown and chmod and now when i try to sude i get this error "sudo: must be setuid root". all i wanted was to be able to create a guest account that couldn't change directories or see the directory tree.

[Iowan]

What did you chown and/or chmod?

[FarmCretin]

i was trying to reset my permissions from scratch. i figured first make everything only root, then my user, then a few select for my lower users. i got as far as chown -R root / and then it all just went to crap.

[MJN]

Please try and use the search function as this is quite a common question.

As you're only 6 posts in I'll help by giving a direct result:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=219767

You may find you'll have other problems now that everything is root-owned. If you're not too far in I'd recommend starting a fresh install. Don't be too disheartened by this though - you learn more by your mistakes!

Incidentally, you don't have to edit (or post) to subscribe to a thread - you can just click Subscribe under 'Thread Tools' (or you can set this to be the default for all your posts within the Control Panel).

Mathew

[pdwerryhouse]

Before doing a complete reinstall, it might be worth trying booting into single user mode and then trying this:

apt-get --reinstall install $(dpkg --get-selections | awk '{print $1}')

Make sure your network is up, however.