ls -ld / /etc /etc/mail drwxr-xrwx 24 root root 4096 Jan 8 14:15 / drwxr-xr-x 96 root root 12288 Jan 11 14:30 /etc drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 10 11:47 /etc/mail
To me it looks like the problem lies with / where it seems to be writable by 'others'. But how to change it I don't know, or if it should be changed even.
# chmod 755 /
What you should be worried about is how your system got into this state in the first place. Any ideas on how someone running as root could change the permissions of the root directory so that any regular user could create, delete and rename files there? For instance, on your system a regular user could run the command "mv /lib /trash" and completely break your system in a way that would be quite difficult to recover from.
Paul.
