Recovering from a 'chmod -r 777 /'

Running a 'chmod -r 777 /' will have catastrophic results on the functioning of any solaris system.

This will prevent most of the OS services & functions from working correctly including ssh & the server will enter maintenance mode if rebooted.

It happened with me a few days ago & this post is about the tasks performed to get the system back up to a stable state.

The first corrective action was to restore /etc to the default mask i.e 755 for directories & 644 for files.

find /etc -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

find /etc -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

The next critical task was to restore services & associated binaries to their expected permissions & ownerships. This task was accomplished with pkgchk command.

pkgchk checks the accuracy of installed files or, by using the  -l  option, displays information about package files. pkgchk checks the  integrity of  directory  structures  and files. Discrepancies are written to standard error along with a detailed explanation of the problem.

To fix the permissions I ran

# /usr/sbin/pkgchk -f 

This command correct file attributes if possible. (permission, datestamp, ownership) 

then to check the binaries: 

# /usr/sbin/pkgchk -n 

After that reboot the server

# /usr/sbin/init 6 

Once the server is up, check the status of smf services: 

# /usr/bin/svcs -xv

After the reboot the services were operating optimally & the server was accessible remotely via ssh. There were some other changes needed which I came across via trial & error but pkgchk did most of the heavy lifting.