Cant apt-get remove or apt-get install | fopen permission denied

Question

So out of no where I was unable to SSH into my headless linux box.

So I hooked up a screen and started tooling with it.

My server is still fully functional and the box seems in tact. I just wouldn't let me SSH in.

So I tried follow a few online tutorials on adding my IP to the SSH allow file but nothing seemed to work.

I kept getting

"Network Connect: Connection Refused"

when attempting to SSH in with putty.

So I decided to nuke the iptables and do

sudo apt-get remove --purge iptables

which resulted in a failure.

Something like this

"processing tables for mandb " "fopen permission denied"

So I tried doing

sudo apt-get install iptables

which it said the same fopen error.

End result is my server is up and running but I have no ssh capabilities into my box. On that note though I do still have an active samba connection. Take that for what its worth.

Answer 1

The fopen permission denied thing when doing apt-get or dpkg, is very often a sign that your manpages cache at /var/cache/man is owned by root:root instead of man:root. Try changing this with

   chown -R man:root /var/cache/man