On Tue, 2006-05-02 at 15:26 -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:

On Tuesday 02 May 2006 9:21 am, Dave Barton wrote:

...

SuSE 9.3 IIRC there was a posting on this list recently, that explained the circumstances under which root was not allowed to change access privileges (permissions) of files/directories owned by root. We have just run into this problem and the only solution I have found is to scrape the files off the Linux box onto a Windows box and then pull them back as a normal user.

Please be more specific. OK! Here are the specifics.

What type of file system? Reiserfs.

Linux native file systems all use the standard rwx for owner, groups and others. Windows file systems do not have the same concept. Yep! Got a grip on that concept around 1981-82.

The root user is also restricted when referrring to files and directories imported from an NFS server. Restricted in what way? This is something I wasn't aware of, so this is a genuine question.

I absolutely don't know what you mean by "scrape the files off the Linux box". Then you don't understand sarcasm, born of frustration ;)

Note that you can always boot a Linux rescue or live CD, and you have root access to all the local files on that box. Yes, that was another solution we considered to resolve the problem.

-- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

The essence of my question was not so much how to work around the problem, more as to why the problem existed. As my original post stated, "IIRC there was a posting on this list recently...". Thanks for taking the time to reply. Dave -- Registered Linux User #288562 http://counter.li.org