What does "sudo chmod -R 777 /" do?

Question

I did sudo chmod -R 777 / on our production server and everything got messed up. The hosted sites and API's stopped working, SSH said connection refused, it was a cyberpanel running cent os 7 and we couldn't even log into cyberpanel.

I thought that all users would have have all permissions on all files in the system and executed the command. I don't quite understand what went wrong.

HI @OroZoro. Go for the backup or last snapshot. Too much work to recover it and related security issues. — jpbrain, Jun 29 '21 at 16:12
Welcome to Ask Ubuntu. CentOS 7 is not an official flavor of Ubuntu. — user68186, Jun 29 '21 at 16:13
The question you probably should be asking is: WHY did you run `sudo chmod -R 777 /` on a production server? — Artur Meinild, Jun 29 '21 at 16:18

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 29 '21 at 16:13

0

You just messed up your system; time to reinstall.

Yes, theoretically you now have all permissions, but you lost all setuid, setgid and sticky bits. Apart from losing all security, of course. Doing that on a production server (!!) is the cherry on top.

You lost the ability to use sudo, su and probably a dozen other commands that you probably wanted to keep using.

answered Jun 29 '21 at 16:13

HuHa

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I thought theoretically and acted, there wasn't any backup maintained, we had to reconfigure everything, to my fortune, there weren't any logs maintained so the culprit is unidentified :). Thanks for your answer. – OroZoro Jun 30 '21 at 05:41

What does "sudo chmod -R 777 /" do?

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