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By accident I changed permissions for /var/lib for 777 recursively. Now I get "Internal errors" and hope to be able to reboot the system.

Is it reversible or just like the / case, the only way is reinstall? I am not really into checking how much the system can go with those permissions.

Quick research led me to change it for 755. Is it right now? I still get "Internal errors", so I guess not. Btw, after I executed chmod again, system tells that the proper permissions is 700, but I still experience "Internal Errors" then. I also get kind of 'permission denied' on dpkg, I am afraid of further managing packages.

Reinstall, reversible or possible to live with it?

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up vote 1 down vote accepted

Test this:

Open a terminal,

Press Ctrl+Alt+T

And run:

sudo -i
chmod -Rf 755 /var/lib
chmod -Rf 700 /var/lib/polkit-1
chmod -Rf 700 /var/lib/sudo
chmod -Rf 700 /var/lib/udisk2
chmod -Rf 750 /var/lib/lightdm
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I guess it worked. I didn't have internet connection any above from router was unreachable at first but googled some from different device, put auto wlan0 in interfaces, restarted service and worked like a charm. I hope the last issue won't happen again. System shouts with errors but it is stable. Thank you for this permissions instruction. – Tomasch Nov 18 '14 at 19:49

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