Well, this is awkward…
So in the process of trying to give the MonstaFTP panel access to the entire file system, I needed to give the user www-data permission for the folder /var/www, however I ran the recursive command one directory above that – in /var. So now all permissions for that folder have been overwritten and are now owned by www-data.
Surprisingly, the device is still functional, however I don’t dare restart it. I’m trying to find a list of the default permissions for the /var folder online, however I’m not having much luck
In the meantime, I have set all the permissions to root, which seems to have fixed most problems that I was experiencing. As usual with us, security is not an issue, but I’m concerned that some permissions might be too restrictive. If a less privileged process tries to access these parts of the system, they’ll spurt out various errors, or maybe completely crash the NUC. Thankfully I haven’t noticed anything like that yet.
If I try to run an application and get errors, all I need to do is give that application permission for the files it wants to read/write. That way, the errors that need to get fixed will get fixed over time.
If there’s something I can’t fix, a system re-image is always an option. My S.A.R.T Interface is completely backed up, and we should have enough good documentation on this site to be able to get it back up and running fairly quickly.