chroot going away in HP-UX 12?

[Jim Gallagher]

Hi,

I heard a rumor that chroot whould not be available in HP-UX 12. I find that hard to believe. Has anyone else heard this? Any comments?

Thanks,

Jim Gallagher

[Dietmar Konermann · Accepted solution]

Hi, Jim!

I cannot confirm this for HP-UX 12... but indeed the chroot(2) will be obsoleted.

You will find in the man page of chroot(2) beginning with 11.11:

---
WARNINGS
Obsolescent Interfaces
chroot() is to be obsoleted at a future date.
---


The chroot(2) has some flaws from a security perspective... so its use is discouraged.

See e.g.
http://www.bpfh.net/simes/computing/chroot-break.html

Please note that the warning is only added to the man page of the chroot systemcall. I strongly assume the command will continue to be available, but using a modern API.

Regards...
Dietmar.

[Cheryl Griffin]

Jim,
I am not sure what the concern is. When obsoleting a command, a replacement command should be released which replaces/enhances the removed command.

This site is a standards compliance site and provides a high level explanation of chroot.
http://devresource.hp.com/STK/class_standards_list.html

Search the page for chroot to find:
chroot() is not portable.

There is not much information on its replacement yet.

Cheryl

[Jim Gallagher]

OK, thanks for the info. The reason I ask is that we are setting up multiple instances of CIFS(Samba) on a single file server using its root directory (chroot) directive. We need to do this because of uid/gid overlap between the sets of files that will be served. Hopefully, we will have the passwd files merged before HP-UX 12, or there is an option for similar chroot functionality later on.

Thanks,

Jim