David> Did the ".*" cause chown to change the ownership to the David> ".."directory, causing the change off the root dir?

Yes ... and with the -R option, it decided to continue down the directory tree ... and down, and down, and down ... :-(

David> After the change in the ownership of those files. No one David> can log in. I am logged in right now as a normal user. I David> can not change any of the ownerships. After the chown David> command I exited "su", which was a very stupid mistake.

Doh!

David> So now, no one can log in and I have no idea what to do.

First, shut down the system any way you can. CTRL+ALT+DELETE on the console should do it---but if you have that feature disabled, run the command `sync' three times and hit the reset button.

Then, boot up as single user. At the boot: prompt, type

hd(0,a)/kernel -s

to do that. It might not work with the permissions all wrong ... but it just might!

If it does, the best way to proceed is to restore from backup tape. This way, you won't have to worry about what the correct owner is for all those various files.

If you haven't been taking backups, then you could try to change the ownerships of every single file by hand. I could even email you a script of commands that should restore the permissions of the base installation files, but be warned that I'm running 2.1 and not 2.0.5.

Yet another option is to upgrade your 2.0.5 installation to 2.1. Then, just the users' home directories permissions need to be fixed.

In any case, good luck. You've committed one of the classic Unix mistakes, and should be proud. (FYI, I've down the ``rm -rf /'' mistake not once but *twice* so far! Once, as an honest mistake. The second time, while I was trying to email what happened by highlighting the text to paste into a mail message but instead pasting into a root shell! DOH! :-)