Tag Archives: selinux

Permanently setting SELinux context on files

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I’m sure there are lots of howtos on the Internet for this, but…

Say you are running a web server like nginx and your log files are in a non-standard location, you may have problems starting the service because SELinux is blocking nginx from reading or writing to the files.

You can set the context of these files so that nginx will be happy:
[user@server ~]$ sudo chcon -Rv --type=httpd_log_t /srv/mydomain.com/logs/

That’s only temporary however, and the original context will be restored if you run restorecon or relabel your filesystem.

So you can do this permanently using the semanage command, like so:

[user@server ~]$ sudo semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_log_t "/srv/mydomain.com/logs(/.*)?"

Now you can use the standard selinux command to restore the correct label and it will use the new one you set above.
[user@server ~]$ sudo restorecon -rv /srv/

Fix problem updating packages in Fedora/Korora due to broken SELinux update

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Unfortunately an update to the SELinux policy package in Fedora 20 (and therefore Korora 20) caused RPM scriptlets to fail when updating packages.

This bug only affects systems that have SELinux mode set to enforcing (which is the default) and were updated to version 3.12.1-116 of the selinux-policy package. If you have seen the following sort of error when updating packages, then this bug may affect you:

warning: %post(libkcompactdisc-4.12.1-1.fc20.x86_64) scriptlet failed, exit status 127
Non-fatal POSTIN scriptlet failure in rpm package libkcompactdisc-4.12.1-1.fc20.x86_64

Below are the commands to resolve this issue (which has been fixed in an updated 3.12.1-117 version of selinux-policy).

sudo setenforce 0
sudo yum clean expire-cache
sudo yum update selinux-policy\*
sudo setenforce 1

The first command disables SELinux enforcement for the current session and the subsequent commands expire the yum cache and install the SELinux policy update which fixes this issue. The last command re-enables SELinux enforcement.

If you previously installed any packages which failed with scriptlet errors like above, you can reinstall them using the following command:

sudo yum reinstall

You can find out what packages were installed after the broken update using a command like this:

sudo sed '1,/selinux-policy-3.12.1-116/d' /var/log/yum.log

If you require any assistance please don’t hesitate to ask for help using Engage or jump onto the #korora channel in IRC freenode.net servers.