Tricky debugging

After cloning a server for a customer we noticed that something was a little bit odd:

# md5sum /etc/sudoers

worked fine but:

# sudo -l

responded with:

sudo: unable to stat /etc/sudoers: Permission denied

How odd we thought. More odd was:

# su - username
Cannot execute /bin/bash: Permission denied

A bit of time with Google and strace revealed that we’d managed to set the permissions on / wrongly:

drwx------  27 root root  4096 Jun  4 11:48 ..

rather than:

drwxr-xr-x  27 root root  4096 Jun  4 11:48 ..

What amazed us was not that the machine didn’t work properly but that we could log in at all.

If this is the sort of problem you’d be able to fix, you should look at our jobs page. If you’d like someone else to fix it for you then our Managed hosting is probably of a lot more interest.