/home is a mounted reiserfs scsi partition. since 2.6.15-gentoo-r5 or so, resierfs extended attribs were slowly accumulating, resulting in unwanted -i flags, and thus unintended file immutability. now, however, latest kernel release (2.6.15-gentoo-r7) seems completely unable to read or change extended attributes: $lsattr lsattr: Inappropriate ioctl for device While reading flags on ./foo lsattr: Inappropriate ioctl for device While reading flags on ./bar lsattr: Inappropriate ioctl for device While reading flags on ./etc ... #chattr -R -Adjc . chattr: Inappropriate ioctl for device while reading flags on ./foo chattr: Inappropriate ioctl for device while reading flags on ./bar chattr: Inappropriate ioctl for device while reading flags on ./etc ... expected behavior: lsattr should return arrtibute flags. chattr should be able to change them. this applies even though extended attributes are enabled in the kernel, and occurs on all partitions: reiserfs and ext3 are both unable to handle attributes.
*** Bug 125413 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
You are dealing with file (inode) atrributes, not extended attributes (xattr) here. I think you'll find that if you boot a significantly older kernel (i.e. vanilla 2.6.15) then you'll get exactly the same behaviour - file attributes are disabled. The idea is that you can use some reiserfs tool to enable attributes by default (which will modify some structure inside the superblock). There was a bug in this code which meant the "set defaults" functionality had no effect. This bug was fixed in 2.6.15-r5 However, when this functionality was enabled, it became apparent that many users have reiserfs partitions with a garbage superblock which enabled these attributes, and also garbage data in the field where file attributes were supposed to go. This lead to many files being shown as immutable, and people complaining that their reiserfs was read-only for no apparent reason. So, in 2.6.15-r7, the functionality allowing file attributes to be on by-default was removed, and we are now close to square 1, where faile attributes must be enabled with the "attrs" file option. Also, this is purely a reiserfs thing, ext3 is unaffected. If I'm wrong about any of the above, please reopen this bug.
