Why can't the ownership of the mount path be changed?

Virtual Private Cloud Classic infrastructure

This troubleshooting topic applies only to Red Hat OpenShift clusters that run version 3.11.

You created a deployment that mounts an IBM Cloud Object Storage bucket to your app. During the deployment, you try to change the ownership of the volume mount path, but this action fails. You see error messages similar to the following:

chown: changing ownership of '<volume_mount_path>': Input/output error
chown: changing ownership of '<volume_mount_path>': Operation not permitted

When you create a bucket in IBM Cloud Object Storage, the bucket is managed by s3fs-fuse. The UID and GID that own the volume mount path are automatically set by Fuse when you mount the bucket to your app and can't be changed.

You can't change the ownership of the volume mount path. However, you can change the UID and GID for a file or a directory that is stored under your volume mount path. For more information, see Object storage: Accessing files with a non-root user fails.