I have some old legacy programs compiled under Centos 6.5 which are no longer supported by the current Centos distros. I therefore made a copy of my old Centos 6 installation under a new directory (say, centos6.5) and copied all the libraries, system binaries and /etc to that directory. By doing

sudo chroot centos6.5 bash

I can run all the old programs without problem. Also, when I do chroot, I am automatically logged in as root. Since I've copied over the passwd* files in /etc, I can su to myself - again, no problem. However, when I create a home directory in centos6.5/home with the same username, the ownership and file permissions of the home directory are different once I log in using chroot. To have a home directory with the same ownership and permissions I have to create it after I log in with chroot. But this means any other personal files I then copy to centos6.5/home/<my username> have the same problems with ownership.

I don't understand why, if all the /etc/passwd* files are the same under my real system and my "chroot" system, this problem occurs. For example I have two different machines with the same passwd files and I can transfer files between the two and preserve all the ownership and permissions.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Terence

Can you show us the commands and their output? Also check the uid and gid of centos6.5/home/myusername using the stat or ls -ln commands. Also try adding a user with useradd -u UID -g GID once you are chrooted.

I wonder if your kernel is compatible with Centos 6.5.

Thanks you to berndbausch - that is exactly what the problem is. It turns out I was transferring files from two different machines and my UID was different on each machine. I have now changed my UID to be the same everywhere and I can now transfer files to my chrooted account with the same ownership and permissions.

Marking this as SOLVED.

Thanks again for your prompt and helpful response,
Terence