chown -R is one of the most dangerous commands you can issue, third only to chmod -R and rm -rf. The reason is that without careful attention to what you type, it can destroy the system's ability to run (as you've seen). So if the command you typed was /u* (which matches /usr) then you do indeed have a trashed system. In the /usr directory, there are dozens of different owners which are required to be correct (not all are bin:bin).
The error you're seeing about PAM is the login security which has detected a possible hacker by seeing that certain security libraries are not owned correctly. Try su but I suspect that that will also fail as 11.11 uses PAM for all authentication, so single user mode is about all you can do. Luckily, chmod is located in /sbin so in single user mode, you'll have a valid copy. Use:
/sbin/chown-R bin:bin /usr
This is about as close as you can get to a working system since there are dozens of files and directories that have different owners. Most of them are root:sys, but in /usr/bin mail and rmail need root:mail ownership, the rest og the non-bin:bin files and directories are root:sys and root:other.
When using dangerous commands, ESPECIALLY when you use pattern matching (like *), always type the command with echo in front of it:
echo chown -R /u*
What you will see is what chmod will see when you remove the echo.
Bill Hassell, sysadmin
