A chroot on Unix operating systems is an operation that changes the apparent root directory for the current running process and its children. A program that is run in such a modified environment cannot name (and therefore normally not access) files outside the designated directory tree.

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Restricting an SSH/SCP/SFTP user to a directory

Is there a simple way to restrict an SCP/SFTP user to a directory? All methods that I've come across require me to set a chroot jail up by copying binaries, but I don't think that should be necessary. ...
16
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2answers
2k views

How do I tell I'm running in a chroot?

I have a unix installation that's supposed to be usable both as a chroot and as a standalone system. If it's running as a chroot, I don't want to run any service (cron, inetd, and so on), because they ...
15
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3answers
1k views

chroot “jail” - what is it and how do I use it?

I have heard/read a lot about the chroot jail under linux but have never yet used it (I use Fedora day-to-day), so what is a chroot "jail"? When and why might I use it/not use it and is there anything ...
11
votes
2answers
4k views

Getting “Not found” message when running a 32-bit binary on a 64-bit system

I have currently a strange problem on debian (wheezy/amd64). I have created a chroot to install a server (i can't give any more detail about it, sorry). Let's call its path /chr_path/. To make things ...
10
votes
2answers
2k views

What to use to harden Linux box? Apparmor, SELinux, grsecurity, SMACK, chroot?

I am planning to go back to Linux as a Desktop machine. I would like to make it more secure. And try a few hardening techniques, especially since I plan to get my own server. What would be a good, ...
6
votes
2answers
787 views

Providing /bin and /lib inside a chroot jail

I need to be able to provide the /bin and /lib directories inside a chroot jail so that programs can dynamically link properly. Is there a way to accomplish this without making a copy of the /bin and ...
6
votes
4answers
565 views

Is there a pbuilder-like environment for RedHat?

I would like to know if is there any utility like Debian's pbuilder, to build RPM packages on RedHat using a clean environment (chroot). I've found mach which has support for something like this but ...
6
votes
1answer
5k views

How can I chroot into a filesystem with a different architechture?

I'm trying to chroot into a Arch Linux ARM filesystem from x86_64. I've seen that it's possible to do using static qemu by copying the binary into the chroot system: cp /usr/bin/qemu-arm ...
6
votes
1answer
487 views

chroot fails with --userspec when chroot is i686

I'm experencing a problem with chroot... I'm running on Arch Linux x86_64. I have a 64 bit chroot and a 32 bit chroot. They are identical except that one is 32 bit and one is 64 bit. I can enter ...
5
votes
1answer
279 views

Why is it possible to leave CHROOT with this config?

I'm trying to create the user lenny, that has read and write permissions in the folder /home/lenny/ and has no shell but only access via SFTP. I'm doing the following: useradd lenny mkdir /home/lenny ...
5
votes
4answers
839 views

Lightweight isolated linux environment

I want an isolated (guest) Linux environment on my computer that I can mess up without worrying about the host. E.g. install a lot of stuff from source without package management, pollute environment ...
4
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1answer
896 views

deleting a 'file' under /proc or /dev

I am using a cowdancer/debootstrap setup to generate a chroot. Of course, as I iterate, I generate some chroot configurations that are bad. I have found myself in an awkward situation where I have ...
4
votes
1answer
376 views

How can I access a directory outside a chroot from within it?

I have a user which is chrooted to her home directory, but I want her to also be able to manage files within /var/www. As such, I did the following: root@server:/home/username# ln -s /var/www www ...
4
votes
3answers
746 views

Boot Linux system from a subdirectory on a partition?

I would like to try to set up a computer so that it has multiple Linux installs all in the same filesystem. For example, the filesytem would have 3 folders: /Ubuntu_Precise, /Ubuntu_Oneiric, and ...
4
votes
3answers
3k views

What to do to run GUI Java app in chrooted environment?

In my case Java app is JDownloader. I prepared chroot environment as explained here: http://www.0x61.com/forum/post5240333.html#p5240333 and here: http://interreality.org/~reed/java-chroot.html ...
4
votes
1answer
156 views

Can you Chroot a program from an OpenVZ environment?

I just recently purchased a Virtual Private Server, and it is OpenVZ virtualization. I am setting up my LAMP stack, and in the past I have always just set up my BIND dns set up in a chrooted ...
4
votes
1answer
101 views

How can I mount a directory of the host system for use inside a FreeBSD jail?

I am performing the following on FreeBSD 9.0-STABLE: mount_nullfs /foo /jail/foo After that, from within the host system, the mount works. So this works: touch /foo/bar && ls /jail/foo/bar ...
4
votes
2answers
277 views

How to rsync a chroot without breaking symlinks?

I'd like to rsync (backup) a chroot environment from outside the chroot. For that I first make a lvm snapshot of the chroot volume and then run rsync on that. The only problem with this approach: ...
4
votes
3answers
221 views

Restrict ssh login from LDAP to users who have a /home directory

I have an Apache server (RHEL 6) hosting multiple user web pages which currently is connected to my Active Directory environment to authenticate users. The server is used to automatically host content ...
3
votes
1answer
824 views

Chroot debian squeeze for shell access

A user requires shell access to an Ubuntu server from the WAN side. There are many shell accounts with simple passwords. So shell port (port 22) is blocked in the firewall. For my WAN side user I am ...
3
votes
1answer
364 views

How to disable certain system calls for a given user?

I am creating a web app similar to codepad and for each run-action my app copies a directory (/home/radeks/voidptr/private/chroot-root) to /tmp/voidptr/[random-id]/chroot-root. This chroot directory ...
3
votes
2answers
2k views

Disable direct login for normal users (like oracle) in linux but allow scp and sftp?

Is it possible to disable direct login for normal users (like oracle) in linux but allow scp and sftp for that use?
3
votes
3answers
260 views

Unabled to get rid of BIND 9 chroot

I had installed bind-chroot from yum not long ago, and saw that there were errors in the daily logs from named. Under further investigation, I noticed a directory loop. The named files resided under ...
3
votes
1answer
1k views

How to restrict ssh users to browse only /home/%u contents

Can I confine my users to their /home/%u directory using only OpenSSH configuration? From instructions I found on the Internet, I stopped the SSH server and appended the following to the sshd_config ...
3
votes
1answer
81 views

Simulate chroot with unshare

I am trying to write a bootstrapper for a minimal, from-source linux distribution. I would like to build in a chroot-like environment. This should simplify packaging. I do not care about security at ...
3
votes
0answers
408 views

Slow system after running a KDE GUI application from a Debian Squeeze chroot

I have a PC with Ubuntu 11.04 and a Debian Squeeze chroot installed in it. As soon as I start any KDE application from within chroot (and installed there), e.g. Kompare for viewing git diff output, ...
2
votes
1answer
89 views

Is it possible to log directly into chroot?

Lets say I boot up my computer and I see the login screen. When I log in as myuser, I want to be restricted to a certain root directory via. chroot. Let's assume that the directory is ...
2
votes
1answer
301 views

When can one reboot from inside a chroot environment?

Sometimes when I chroot into some folder , I could use reboot to reset my box, but sometimes I can't. So I want to know why I could do that sometimes and why. UPDATE The chroot environment is ...
2
votes
1answer
713 views

How to run Firefox in a chroot jail?

I've got this chroot jail all setup. I try to run Firefox in it, and get the message: "Gtk-WARNING ** cannot open display: " I know I have to invoke Firefox with --display= something. I probably ...
2
votes
1answer
88 views

How to achieve the effect of chroot in userspace in Linux (without being root)?

The goal is to install and run programs in a displaced (relocated) distro (whose / must not coincide with the global /) inside a host Linux system. The programs are not adapted for using a different / ...
2
votes
1answer
358 views

How to unmount a formerly chroot'd filesystem?

I'm using a rescue-live-system (similar to a live-cd) to fix some issues with my Debian server, like that: # mkdir -p /mnt/rescue # mount /dev/md2 /mnt/rescue # mount --bind /dev /mnt/rescue/dev/ # ...
2
votes
1answer
560 views

SFTP: give user access to folder outside home

I have a machine running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with OpenSSH server installed. I have created a user with a jailed home account. When I log in with the user's account, I can only access his home (duh). ...
2
votes
2answers
872 views

OpenSSH, chroot user: Root needs to own the user directory, is there any consequence?

I want to create an account for my friend on my computer, but I don't want my friend to be able to view all my files. I saw that with OpenSSH, there is an option for that. Inside the SSHD ...
2
votes
2answers
420 views

Is there a drawback when using a chroot in high performance computing?

My (small) company uses an out-of-date linux (centos) software stack to run a proprietary software on a small cluster. Understandingly, IT is reluctant to upgrade since everything works now. I'd like ...
2
votes
3answers
1k views

Display X applications on an Android system

Host system: Android 3.2.1 Honeycomb Chroot system: Debian Testing lxde Hardware: Asus eee pad transformer tablet nvidia arm architecture Note 1: The Debian system boots on this hardware, thus it ...
2
votes
2answers
434 views

Mount points in a chroot

I have some device (say /dev/sda1) mounted at /home/user1. I also have a full Linux system under /tmp/chroot, and the directory /tmp/chroot/home contains only one directory named user2. If I chroot ...
2
votes
3answers
611 views

Is there a linux vfs tool that allows bind a directory in different location (like mount --bind) in user space?

For a user process, I want to mount a directory in other location but in user space without root privilieges. Something like mount --bind /origin /dest, but with a vfs wrapper. Like a usermode ...
2
votes
3answers
332 views

Servers running from chrooted Ubuntu on HP TouchPad? [closed]

The problem: servers appear to be broken inside my Ubuntu chroot. No matter what kind of server I try to run, they all seem unresponsive (VLC server won't respond to client, mkRemote doesn't move the ...
2
votes
1answer
289 views

Debian unstable chroot security issues

This page describes how you can use the debootstrap utility to install a base Debian unstable/sid system on an existing Linux machine. The new install is accessible using chroot. When doing this, ...
2
votes
1answer
192 views

How to add another domain to my chrooted named server

Firstly I successfully have a domain working in a chroot named. There are files in /var/named/chroot/var/named called mydomain.com.db and named.local and named.root. Also in /var/named/chroot/etc ...
2
votes
1answer
3k views

Chrooted SFTP with full access to SSH stopped working (Debian)

I've got a home server on Debian 6 for backups. I'd like to setup chrooted SFTP environment with SSH access for some users (only for my knowledge, there are two users now). It almost works or rather ...
2
votes
1answer
31 views

Share a directory over FTP with chroot_local enabled

I'm using vsftpd. By default, when I create a user, they are jailed in their directory which is /home/user. I have enabled chroot_local_user=YES. On the other hand, I also wanted to create a shared ...
2
votes
1answer
40 views

Cannot open GUI after ssh -X and chroot

I ssh ( with -X option ) to another computer then I I do a chroot. I then encounter problems running X11 apps. As one example, after the ssh I would run emacs and it would open a new window as a X11 ...
2
votes
2answers
853 views

getting 553 - cannot create file in vsftpd (ubuntu 12.04)

I'm trying to setup a ftp account for a user that has read/write access to one folder: /items/myuser I've set up the account with username 'myuser' in Linux with the adduser command. After that, I've ...
2
votes
3answers
311 views

Chroot Risks w/ /dev and /proc

I am planning to set up a few chroot jails for some users to run/test Java applications (lets just assume each application is untrusted). Is there any risk involved with mounting /dev and /proc into ...
2
votes
2answers
689 views

GParted LiveCD: Is there a version with a 64-bit kernel?

I'm trying to chroot with the GParted LiveCD onto an existing 64-bit system, attempting to fix grub.
2
votes
1answer
357 views

Preventing ChromeOS from blanking the screen when working on a different tty

I am running Archlinux in a chroot alongside Chrome OS on a chromebook. The original project is there, my fork of it is here (mostly similar). The issue is that the display power management of Chrome ...
2
votes
1answer
318 views

Are there any differences between mounting a /proc filesystem inside a chroot compared to mounting it from the outside?

Compare the following: mount -t proc none ./my_chroot/proc and: chroot ./mychroot mount -t proc none /proc
2
votes
0answers
142 views

remount chrooted read-only subdirectory (non-mountpoint) to read-write from within jail?

I'm trying to do the same of this question (multiple linux installation on same filesystem) but I get this result (root filesystem mounted as read-only) . I'm using debian/sid, have successfully ...
2
votes
0answers
94 views

How to find current chroot jail path on Linux <2.6.26

While running kernel 2.6.26 or newer it's possible to get the path of the current chroot jail by comparing the mountinfo of the current process and the init process. Is there a way to get the same ...

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