/usr permissions changed from root to staff

[KHarvey]

For some reason when installing some extensions the permissions for /usr change from root to staff.  I had this problem before with xlockmore and the extension owner fixed the problem and a reinstall fixed it.  The problem is there are a lot of extensions that change this permission.  At one point I thought I would try to create a list of extensions, but it was almost every other extension I was installing.  If need be I can resurrect the list if someone wants, but it was pretty lengthy.

My question is can I just do a chown -R root /usr to fix this problem?  Or another command to fix the permission? 
Normally I just uninstall galc and then reinstall galc to solve the problem since I know that galc is a known working extension.  My problem right now is I am unable to reboot to uninstall galc (I have a couple projects running that I don't want to reboot and lose everything).

[tinypoodle]

My question is can I just do a chown -R root /usr to fix this problem?  Or another command to fix the permission?

Your command would change owner, not group.
Use either 'sudo chown -R owner:group' or 'chgrp -R group'.

Not sure about the consequences of changing group though, what makes you want to do so?

[KHarvey]

Sorry, it's a bit early for me.  I needed to run virtual box this morning when my UK office woke me up.  But when I go to open my work VM I receive the following error:

Code: [Select]

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine WorkSucks
Failed to load VMR0.r0 (VERR_SUPLIB_OWNER_NOT_ROOT)

The error is caused because /usr has the permissions of tc:staff, but it needs to be root:root
If I run chown -R root:root on /usr will that break anything else?  I just want to make sure that if I change the permissions to (in theory) what they are supposed to be, I am not going to cause any extra damage.

[curaga]

Yes, it'll break extension loading. /usr/local/tce* need to be accessible to tc.

[tinypoodle]

Booting with "norestore base" could give you an idea about pristine ownership/permissions