This is embarrassing, but I need to fix my mistake and ask for assistance rather then dig my grave any further.
While working on installing Fail2Ban on a server I wondered if permissions was the reason F2B was failing to launch properly, so I ran:
chmod 755 -R ../
while I was in /etc/fail2ban/
.
Right after that I went to restart the service, but got a response along the lines of "Unknown UID 1000... Who are you?" I still have a shell to the server and should be able to execute any sh script as root thanks to an administrative tool assuming it has not been harmed.
I don't know how bad this is and I am too scared to touch it after this grave of a mistake.
I feel like what I just did was almost the equivalent of sudo rm -rf /.
Please, I am begging for your help!