Hello guys,

Another newbie question, if you were to choose an easy to use CHROOT tool for Debian lenny, which one would it be?

I could play about for ages, hopefully by asking you good folk first I can save a whole lotta time.


Thanks all..

Is there such a thing as a "CHROOT Tool"? I have never heard of one (which doesn't mean such a thing does not exist..), and I thought chroot is the "CHROOT Tool"


Sasha

..yah I was a newbie, I mean a GUI for the CHROOT tool ..sorry!

It's simply one command to change root and when you are done type "exit" to return to the original root. What do you plan to accomplish with a gui for this?

once you chroot in to the alternate file system you can start the window manager of that particular system as far as I know.

I dont see any reason why you would need a GUI for chroot... once you issue the first command "chroot [path/to/change to]" then you forget about chroot altogether...

edit:

@KingX

you beat me to it...

the commmand is?

as I mentioned in my post:

"chroot [path/to/chroot to]"

lets say you have a gentoo system in the folder /mnt/gentoo.

you do

"chroot /mnt/gentoo"

and thats it, /mnt/gentoo will be your / until you issue the exit command.

The command is "chroot" (no quotes).

Forrest

.. it's getting all technical now. I thought CHROOT was to put somebody in jail (So my son told me!) So that my user SSH123 only had access to the folder xyz. I've got debian lenny and the package manager offers me 1 million tools to do the job, which one do I go for?

If you run the command "chroot /path/to/xyz" you will be in that chrooted environment. It isn't actually a jail (as seen in FreeBSD for example) though. If that is what you want, look at this site:

http://wiki.openvz.org/Main_Page

HTH

Forrest

This is a good explanation of chroot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroot.
Loosely speaking, there are 2 main uses

1. chroot temporarily eg when fixing up a broken system from the linux rescue mode
2. setting up a chrooted env permanently for a given user or process eg bind (DNS server) is usually setup that way these days.
See 16.1.3 http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...5_ch-bind.html for an example.

Thanks for your help guys,

You all seem to think this is a simple task, according to http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/se...sh-env.en.html it aint so easy!

Any thoughts?

Ludo -- While using the CHROOT command is *extremely simple*, setting up a chroot-jail is a little more complex.

That said, having read the whole page you linked to, my opinion is that the instructions there are *very* good, and if you take the time to read the page and understand what they're telling you to do, you can do it

Note: it's just a personal thing of mine, but in regards to the section about needing to patch the sshd to accomplish one of the methods described, I don't like it. For the same reason that I prefer my kernel to be the way it is presented by kernel.org -- unpatched! The way I see it, if the developers figure it needs to be patched, then it *would* be patched already when it's released as stable. Again though, this is just my feeling on such things.

If you want to set up a chroot jail for ssh, read that page, follow the examples; take your time! And if/when there's something you don't grasp, well, that's why you're here (why we're all here) -- someone will help you out.

Cheers,
Sasha

That article seems to be specifically talking about the difficulties of setting up an ssh server in a chrooted environment, not setting up a chrooted environment itself. Setting up a chrooted environment is pretty easy. Are you wanting to set up an ssh server in a chrooted environment? If so, how many users are you trying to support? If you are this new to Linux and the concept of a chroot, I'm guessing you probably don't even need an ssh server, but I could be wrong.

Forrest

..Thank you for your considered replies.

Ok dokey GrapefruiTgirl, why does the page I refered to have an "easy way" of doing what I require (sorry forrestt your wrong. I need SSH server and a jail for just a few users) and a "hard way" of achieving the same task!

My ever so simple question is "what is the right way to do it?"
I'm quite happy to dive in and experiment, but asking advice from other users that have "been to linux hell and back" makes much more sense to me

All the best...Ludo