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Full Discussion: chown: Read-only file system
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers chown: Read-only file system Post 302644147 by Clovis_Sangrail on Monday 21st of May 2012 11:13:08 AM
Old 05-21-2012
Years and years ago I worked for a small ISP (Internet Service Provider) that offered Unix (SunOS) shell accounts. In order to prevent the installation of rootkits and such, we would read-only mount as many partitions as possible, including /usr and /sbin. Not only were they mounted read-only, but they were mounted from a separate disk drive that was set via a jumper to be read-only! (Actually, we carefully soldered wires to the pins and ran them to a switch, so that we could install software updates w/o disassembling the box.)

A couple of times over the decade or so that I worked there we had someone who (as best as I could tell) got a root shell, tried to install some kind of rootkit/backdoor, found that the executables they wanted to over-write were in a r/o partition, edited the fstab to mount the partition read-write, and rebooted in the hopes of (I assume) logging in again with the ability to over-write stuff. The r/o drive would make the box cyclicly reboot until we found it.

In various log files I'd see the error you list in your initial post. If you aren't the admin for the machine you need to consult with that person.
 

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LEARN ABOUT MINIX

fstab

FSTAB(5)							File Formats Manual							  FSTAB(5)

NAME

       fstab, mtab - list of file systems to mount, mounted file system table.

SYNOPSIS

       /etc/fstab

       /etc/mtab

DESCRIPTION

       /etc/fstab  is  a table of file system to mount at boot time, /etc/mtab is a table of currently mounted file systems as maintained by mount
       and umount.

       /etc/fstab is not read by mount as it should be.  It is instead a simple shell script listing the three devices that Minix needs  to  oper-
       ate:   The device names of the root file system, the temporary (scratch) file system, and the file system for /usr.  Of these only the /usr
       file system is mounted in /etc/rc, the scratch file system is there for the system administrator to test new kernels,  or  as  a  temporary
       file system.

       /etc/mtab contains lines of four fields.  The layout is:

	      device	directory    type    options

       These fields may be explained as follows:

       device
	      A block special device.

       directory
	      Mount point.

       type
	      Either 1, or 2, indicating a V1 or V2 file system.

       options
	      Either ro, or rw, indicating a read-only or read-write mounted file system.

FILES

       /etc/fstab     Shell script naming three important file systems.

       /etc/mtab      List of mounted file systems.

SEE ALSO

       printroot(8), mount(1), fsck(1), mkfs(1).

BUGS

       /etc/fstab is a joke.

AUTHOR

       Kees J. Bot (kjb@cs.vu.nl)

																	  FSTAB(5)
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