chroot question?

[rveri]

Hi all,
What is chroot and what is the use.

Thanks.

[Victor Fridyev]

Hi,

chroot is a possibility to define some directory as the upper (root) directory for an application or user[s].
This permits to define areas which are accessible for users or applications. For example, chroot can limit ftp users not to see directories except /home/ftpusers.


The details you can see in
man chroot and man 1m chroot

HTH

[Arunvijai_4 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Here is a good article about "chroot" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroot

-Arun

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

chroot is referred to often as the chroot jail.

It is a security method that keeps a process or user in a limited environment.

Say the user logs in and normally gets /home/username as home directory.

In a normal environment that user can cd / to root

In a chroot environment /home/username becomes root and the user can't move up to root and do harm.

The downside is that the user loses access to many necessary commands and a chroot configuration needs to provide that access to users.

The neat thing about chroot is its not just for users. DNS/Bind is commonly run in a chroot jail. HP's apache server ships with a configuration script to run it in a chroot jail.

In the case of an appliction, lets say a malicious web user figures out how to override apache and get a shell prompt. If its running in a chroot jail the user can do almost nothing with this session.

Quite useful, though not so easy to configure.

SEP

[Raj D.]

Hi ,

You can check this documents as well,

New user and chroot configuration

http://docs.hp.com/en/T1471-90011/ch01s12.html



chroot-example:

http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/tutorials/chroot-example.html


Cheers,
Raj.