trying to understand SELinux message

Paul Allen Newell pnewell at cs.cmu.edu
Mon Nov 16 05:09:05 UTC 2009


Hello:

I just upgraded two of my systems to latest yum update 
(2.6.30.9-96.fc11.i686.PAE) with the hopes that the CD and DVD issues 
have been resolved (they have, almost, but thats a separate bugzilla 
report).

What I am querying about in this email is a message that I am seeing 
when I log in as root (yes, I know the caveats and try to respect, but I 
always make sure the ability is there if I need it). I log in from the 
start page GUI and there are no problems until, after a couple of 
seconds later, a pop-up from the "star icon in the upper right" says I 
got problems. I open it up and it says:

"SELinux is preventing the gdm-session-wor from using potentially 
mislabeled files (/root)."

Okay, that's nice to know, but I have no idea what it is trying to tell 
me needs to be fixed. I've got a couple files in the home directory but 
nothing looks funny about them (*.txt cut-and-paste of yum 
update/installs and an html of "how-to-install f11 from scratch").

I have edited both /etc/pam.d/gdm and /etc/pam.d/gdm-password per Fedora 
website instructions to allow root access.

Closer inspection says that I first began getting this message on 
20jun09 after a yum update (I did original f11 install at the beginning 
of June). I just hadn't noticed it since I don't often log in as root, 
though I do remember seeing something in the summer and figuring it was 
a glip that would get fixed in future updates).

Any suggestions as to what I should be looking for to get rid of this 
message ... if I do indeed actually need to pay attention to it. If 
there is more info I can provide, please let me know what it is and how 
to get it and I will gladly post such.

Thanks in advance,
Paul





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