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

Tue Nov 30 16:11:51 UTC 2010
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On Monday, November 29, 2010 11:02:59 pm cpolish at surewest.net wrote:
> Your enthusiasm for SELinux seems tied conceptually to a workstation
> running the set of applications that come with the distribution.
> Nothing wrong with that.

I have used a Linux as my primary desktop for 13 years; so, yeah, I do sometimes have a desktop slant.  I've run Linux servers for that same amount of time; I've seen hacks succeed, and recently I've seen hacks fail thanks to SELinux.

I bring out desktop scenarios simply to bring that out in a sea of server-centric discussions; do that will by default give the sense that I'm desktop-slanted, when I run both, but have quicker desktop paradigms since I use my desktop in more 'critical' ways than I use my servers (things like online banking on the desktop, where data theft is the critical issue).  Now my servers are mission-critical for sure; but data theft there wouldn't be quite as directly impacting as data theft on my laptop would be.

Of course, my desktops are Fedora rather than CentOS; although I might switch one to CentOS 6 early next year.