Two days ago, I did a fresh Arch install, everything went fine, then I changed my mind about my HDD partitioning and reformatted it, and installed Arch again, the install boots okay and all, but NetworkManager was down, when I investigated it, I found out that dbus service fails to start here is what systemctl status dbus returns:
dbus-broker-launch[383]: launcher_add_services @ ../dbus-broker-35/src/launch/launcher.c +805
dbus-broker-launch[383]: launcher_run @ ../dbus-broker-35/src/launch/launcher.c +1416
dbus-broker-launch[383]: run @ ../dbus-broker-35/src/launch/main.c +152
dbus-broker-launch[383]: main @ ../dbus-broker-35/src/launch/main.c +178
dbus-broker-launch[383]: Exiting due to fatal error: -107
I've run journalctl with some filtering and found this too:
systemd-tmpfiles[327]: Detected unsafe path transition / (owned by 999) -> /var (owned by root) during canonicalization of var/lib/dbus
systemd-tmpfiles[327]: Detected unsafe path transition / (owned by 999) -> /run (owned by root) during canonicalization of run/dbus
I ran ls / -l and found out that my boot partition is owned by a user named 999 and group adm (what the hell is this?)
I've tried installing dbus-daemon-units and remove dbus-broker and dbus-broker-units, now I got a different problem which was that dbus was timing out on start, so the problem might not be caused by dbus itself, I really don't want to reinstall Arch again, I'm chrooting into my install for internet connection too
Also check ls -ld / to view the permissions of / itself. Sounds like whatever happened to boot also happened to the root. A quick chown root:root / should make dbus happy. Don't recursively chown or chmod the root partition, that can result in a worse situation. Hopefully only / and /boot were affected.
Yes I only created / and /boot from the Mint live boot
So that's why the wrong IDs came from. Technically the filesystem doesn't know about names, it knows about IDs, and software just look at /etc/passwd and /etc/groups to go ID<>name.
/ should be 0755 (drwxr-xr-x). Boot, you can chown it all to root and 0755 for directories and 0644 for files safely. The reason you can't for the root is, you'll likely break executable state or SUID bits that sudo needs to be sudo.