[ale] Unexpected password change!

[householdwords at gmail.com (H P Ladds)]

On 9/12/07, David Tomaschik <ozone at webgroup.org> wrote:

> Any recent upgrades?  Might've broken PAM.  Can you not log in to the
> development or stable side?
>
> David
> _______________________________________________

Thanks for the reply.

I was monkeying around with chmod, and I changed the permissions of
the  / directory. I could sign-in but was denied access /. Failing to
gain access to almost all filesystems, my system fell back to the
log-in screen. This gave the impression that I had entered the wrong
password.

On the bright side I did NOT chmod -R the / directory as I had
previously thought. Soon after changing the permissions on /, I did
chmod -R /home/username. This gave me the impression that the
permissions had changed from / to the end of /home/username/*. In
reality I had only changed the beginning and end of that particular
branch -- no other files or directories -- whew!

H. Preston