Hi,

> why fiddling with permissions and groups where you can isolate
> _everything_ wasting some disk space?
> AFAIK, chrooting is the way that big hosting providers uses. this also
> lets you limit the commands a user can execute, while root can still use
> every binary.

I know, I've used this method a few years ago on my own server. But chroot has 
some disadvantages. Firstly, you have to copy all required bins, libs and 
dependencies(!) after each update. Of course, this can be done by a script, 
but nevertheless you can't be sure that every single user site still works if 
you don't clone all libs and bins (for example, I had the problem that 
ImageMagick released something into a separate binary which was suddenly 
missing because it wasn't listed by ldd).

Next, a user might be able to upload and execute his own binary. To prevent 
this, you have to disable chown functions completely or bind the user-writable 
tree to a partition mounted with noexec option.

And finally, it's possible to break out from a chroot jail ([1]).

Conclusion: It's very, very hard to realize a real secure chroot jail without 
making it unusable. If you want to have real separated processes per user, buy 
a lot of ram and use a virtual maschine (OpenVZ should do so). If you just 
want to hide your customer's from each other, use anonymous user names or the 
chgrp method.

[1] http://www.bpfh.net/simes/computing/chroot-break.html

Viele Grüße,
Roland Tapken
-- 
Privacy is not a crime!

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