[CentOS] centos5 iptables expert needed

Thu Aug 30 14:40:51 UTC 2007
Lanny Marcus <mailing-lists at computer2.com>

On 28 August 2007, John Plemons <john at mavin.com> wrote:
<snip>
> You might try loading a copy of Webmim onto your linux box, there is a
> Firewall module that will make changing and setting up the routing
> very easy and quick to understand...
> 
> www.webmim.com
> webmin-1.360-1.noarch.rpm
> There is a simple RPM install that works with Centos...

Three comments about webmin:

(a) There is a huge (800 pages?) manual for webmin in .pdf format,
available for download from the webmin web site.

(b) I installed it on my Desktop (CentOS 5.0) a couple of weeks ago and
I ran into a problem, because I have SELinux running in Permissive Mode.
I first submitted to Bugzilla at Upstream and he tracked it down to
Webmin, so I moved the bug to sourceforge:
<https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=117457&aid=1781101&group_id=17457>

This is what Jamie wrote:
> Ok, thanks ... I see the problem. Webmin opens the log file
> /var/webmin/miniserv.error and connects STDERR to it, then runs other
> commands like iptables, which inherits the STDERR file descriptor.
> This is generally a good thing, as any error output from the iptables
> command will go to that log file.
> 
> But with selinux enabled, this fails as iptables doesn't have the
> security context needed to write to that file.
> Is there a chcon option or other command that can allow a file to be
> written by any process? If so, I should update Webmin to run that on
> the error log file.
> 
ASAP, I will get back to him and I'm sure he will solve the problem. :-)

(c) It is my belief (others, with much more webmin experience can
confirm or reject this thought), that webmin will be more reliable, when
it changes configuration files, than many of the GUI's from Upstream.