[CentOS] SELinux - way of the future or good idea but !!!

William Warren hescominsoon at emmanuelcomputerconsulting.com
Wed Dec 8 15:03:23 UTC 2010


On 12/8/2010 9:13 AM, Christopher Chan wrote:
> On Wednesday, December 08, 2010 09:31 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> On 12/8/10 4:22 AM, David Sommerseth wrote:
>>> On 30/11/10 03:52, cpolish at surewest.net wrote:
>>>> Christopher Chan wrote:
>>>>> Les Mikesell wrote:
>>> [...snip...]
>>>>> As was already mentioned in another post, run in permissive mode, for a
>>>>> few days if you must, and go through all the things the software does
>>>>> and voila! setroubleshoot and/or logs tell you what needs doing.
>>>> Very optimistic, that. In my shop, some things run annually.
>>>> A comprehensive system test = production, for a year. Just
>>>> this morning a 1099 (annual tax-form) script failed in test.
>>> So you would rather disable SELinux completely - 365 days a year, rather
>>> than to switch to permissive mode when running this script once a year?
>>>
>>> I'm sorry, but I'm not able follow that logic.
>> In our case if something fails once a year we lose customers and money.  I'd
>> expect that to be fairly common.
>>
> Again, that particular process is unlikely to be missed and also show to
> be easily mitigated by doing a realtime switch from enforcing to
> permissive. Such annual processes are fairly common and usually run
> manually. You have yet to make a compelling case for completely
> disabling SELinux just for this sort of thing.
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loosing customers and money on an annual basis is a great reason to kill 
it.  Make it able to work without updates interfering with a formerly 
running configuration on a regular basis and more folks will adopt it.  
Saying killing it because it is hurting your business isn't a valid 
reason is arrogant and frankly stupid.  Frankly, there's several other 
distros that don't run SeLinux and they aren't anymore problematic when 
properly configured than RHEL is..and they just work.  Let's put the 
SeLinux religion aside..make it not only technically superior but 
actually usable and helpful and you'll see a wider adoption.  The kind 
of arrogance I've seen in this thread is a primary reason it won't get 
appreciable traction outside of RHEL and why it won't be a major tool in 
admins toolbox inside RHEL unless folks don't NEED the flexibility Linux 
in general offers and SELinux restricts.



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