[CentOS] Odd failure of smbd to start from init.d - CentOS 5.4 - it's that fine SELinux

Wed May 26 00:46:56 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

Whit Blauvelt wrote:
> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 07:55:12PM -0400, Whit Blauvelt wrote:
>> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 04:33:53PM -0700, Jerry Franz wrote:
>>
>>> Are you running with SELinux on?
> 
> You were right Jerry! 
> 
> echo 0 > /selinux/enforce
> 
> and then /etc/init.d/smb restart works! Thank you much Jerry!
> 
> Now why doesn't that fine piece of government work, selinux, do something
> standard and useful like log when it's instituting breakage?? I get that
> it's doing it "for your own good," but what good is it if it doesn't tell
> you what it's doing? The _first place_ I looked when we ran into this
> problem was the logs. Nada. Zilch.
> 
> Programs that try to be smarter than the root user are annoying enough.
> Programs that do that and don't try to educate the root user while they're
> doing it are worse. There are standards for logging. Selinux is ignoring
> them. If it's going to be breaking stuff by default, and failing to log the
> breakage by default, that's not remotely good. Yet that's how CentOS
> installs it. Are we downstream of some Redhat brilliance here?

I would have looked at selinux first for any "odd failure", but I thought it 
related to the process itself and couldn't see any way that the process would be 
different when started as "sh /etc/init.d/smb restart" than simply 
/etc/init.d/smb restart.  Is it?

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com