Permission denied for chmod as root

openvzpermissionsroot

I need to manage a customer's openvz guest (latest debian squeeze 64 bit). Now when I try to do a chmod 0750 /root as root it gives me Permission denied. This really puzzles me, as I thought root can do everything.

As far as I can tell there's no selinux running (is this possible at all in an openvz guest?). I looked into some logfiles (syslog, kern, dmesg) and didn't see any messages.

How can find why root is unable to chmod 0750 /root?

Update: It's even more weird as I also cannot create any files in /root. mkdir: cannot create directory '/root/test': Permission denied

Best Answer

Ok, I just found out the directory was marked as "immutable" as can be checked with lsattr. After doing a chattr -i /root everything works now as expected :)