Hello all,

I am testing a chroot'ed nginx setup on Debian Lenny and am receiving the error: `getpwnam("www-data") failed` when I try to start nginx. My search to find a possible solution have so far been fruitless but I am hoping someone smarter than I could offer some advice.

I've setup the "jail" in /chroot/nginx, created the relevant directory structure (/dev/, /etc, /usr, /var, etc.). Then I copied files that "ldd `which nginx`" showed as linked to the relevant directories, and also copied what I believe are the necessary /etc/* files to /chroot/nginx/etc/. So my directory structure is basically as follows:

/chroot/nginx (base chroot directory)
/etc
passwd, shadow, group, hosts, nsswitch.conf, resolv.conf
/nginx
nginx.conf,
/sites-{available, enabled}
/usr
/sbin
nginx
/lib
*(some shared library files here)
/lib
libnss_dns* files, libnss_compat* files, libnss_files*, and some other shared library files here
/var
/dev
/tmp

(that's a non-exhaustive overview, but is hopefullly enough to diagnose the problem)

I know that it's not a getpwnam() issue, as I found a forum discussion which involves troubleshooting the getpwnam() function with a simple C program to ensure that getpwnam() is indeed working properly. I've tested this and it works as expected in a non-chroot setting (discussion is here, it's in Russian, so you may need to use Google Translate: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?21,128545,129156#msg-129156).

I am using the start-stop-daemon to manage nginx with a script similar to this: http://snippets.aktagon.com/snippets/155-nginx-startup-script-for-Debian. So to start nginx I run:

# start-stop-daemon --start --pidfile /var/run/nginx/nginx.pid --exec /usr/sbin/nginx --chroot /chroot/nginx

And this is what throws the error. I think that it's really an issue of having my paths or permissions wrong such that getpwnam() cannot read/find the passwd file, but my attempts to change permissions, owners, and paths have not been successful. Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Chad