I am aware of ACLs or something like that in Solaris 10 where you can change who can access directories and such that goes beyond the standard permisisons (chmod and rwxrwxrwx).
Although I thought when these were being used, the permissions listing would show a '+' appeneded to the permisions, like shown below:
# ls -laFd local
dr-xr-xr-x+ 1 root root 1 Nov 13 13:27 local/
However, in this case there is no '+'. It looks like this:
# ls -laFd local
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 1 Nov 13 13:27 local/
I noticed that the permissions are : root:root, whereas you are root:other ? is it possible that the group you are in doesn't have rights to modify certain files / folders ?
The source code on opensolaris indicates that message means that the chmod system call failed. So I'm guessing it's a loopback mount or something like that. What does this show:
mount -v