email accounts disappeared

[longtex]

I'm guessing this is a file or directory problem. Friday (10/6/2006) everything was okay - or at least, I didn't get any complaints; today (MOnday 10/9/2006) on all domains on this virtual host, all of the subsidiary accounts have disappeared. Also, in the cpanel for the domains I've looked at so far, it says that the contact information hasn't been set and that there are no recorded previous logins...

Where to look?

 

[longtex]

Found it - the /home directory had all usernames' owner/group changed to some nonexistent user... fixed, changed root pw, rebooted. All looks good now... except for finding out how this happened!

 

[longtex]

Found it - the /home directory had all usernames' owner/group changed to some nonexistent user... fixed, changed root pw, rebooted. All looks good now... except for finding out how this happened!

Got it. Bob was setting up a new user account for demoing a web/vpn app via putty/ssh login, and copied an existing directory, went to the new one and chown/chgrp from old to new. Turns out that chown -R xxx .* changes the updir as well as the current/subdirs, while chown -R xxx * changes only the current/subdirs - the idea, of course was to change the dotted files. Never occurred to me until I was bitching about user "sams" and found out about the demo!

If you do chown -R sams .* from the /home/sams directory, you hose /home, but if you do it from, say, /home/sams/public_ftp you change only that and the /home/sams hierarchy... the key os to go one more level past /home/xxx

Siggghhhh... live and learn.