SELinux survey (was RE: Stupid F7 boot loop)

[Nigel Henry]

On Thursday 30 August 2007 11:20, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Andrew Kelly wrote:
> > At any rate, let's assume that SELinux is mature and ripe, that it
> > interferes with nothing and there are no more issues with updates and
> > whatnot. It's landed, and can be deployed without worry.
> > What exactly do I gain by doing it? What have I protected myself from?
>
> If you understand what SELinux is, the gain is immediately obvious. Here
> is a recent article
>
> http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/05/04/whats-new-in-selinux-for-red-hat-e
>nterprise-linux-5/
>
> Rahul

Hi Rahul

Thanks for the link to that article above. For the first time when installing 
a distro, I'd left Selinux enabled (enforcing) for Fedora 7. There had been 
no problems, but today I tried to FTP into it from the other machine with no 
success. I ran tail -f /var/log/messages on fedora 7, and tried to FTP in 
again from the other machine, and immediately saw it was an Selinux problem. 

The article showed setroubleshoot, so I thought I may as well try and fix the 
problem, so I fired it up, and it showed how to fix the FTP problem with a 
simple:  (if I've remembered the command correctly)
setbool -P ftp_user_dir=1

It worked like magic. I hope any other Selinux problems that crop up on Fedora 
7 are as easy to fix.

All the best.

Nigel.