Wednesday, September 03, 2008

A day of major OS X errors

I just happened to notice today that Macintosh HD was owned by Unknown and Group owned also by Unknown (obviously, these are leftovers from the fact that that bloody repair guy set an incorrect username for me when he reinstalled Leopard in May)
So, I took out the Unknown user and put in myself as owner. then I set Admin as group owner.
Next, I applied these changes to all underlying folders and files.
That's when the trouble started.
First, neither the dropdown terminal nor a normal terminal worked.
Both had this on the terminal where nothing at all else worked or moved -- completely dead -- can't even type one letter:

login: PAM Error (line 396): System error
login: Could not determine audit condition

Luckily this was easy to resolve based on this fix which just meant eliminating the file /usr/bin/login
After that both terminal worked fine, even after a reboot.
The next problem was that Verify Disk Permissions and Repair disk Permissions both gave this errors whether I ran this from the installed OS X or from the install disk.
The underlying task reported failure on exit

From what I read, this seems to be a trivial error but it is annoying and I would like to get rid of it.
Next, I can't use sudo anymore in a terminal. Trying sudo gives this error
sudo: must be setuid root

From what I can see, resolving this means changing the ownership of /usr/bin/sudo from root:wheel which it is now to root:admin. However, I don't have permission to do this without sudo.

Finally, I am unable to make any changes whatsoever to Sharing&Permissions in the getInfo for Macinstosh HD despite me being a member of the admin group.

I posted to the MacRumors forum on this but, as yet have got no useful replies.

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