On Sun, Jun 17, 2007 at 13:22:07 -0600, Telly Williams wrote: > Florian Kulzer wrote: > > > >I think that depends on how restrictive your SELinux setup is. Can you > >turn SELinux off and try to install slib again? > > > > > Whoa. I did 'echo 0 >/selinux/enforce' and now everything works, including > Open Office. Thanks Florian. > > I just began using SELinux and trying to understand how everything works. > Why wouldn't it let me install slib while I was root? Is it that there's no > such thing as a Super User in SELinux? ~Telly
As far as I understand it, the point of SELinux is to be able to put finer-grained restrictions on everybody, including root. For example, you might want to forbid root to do certain things if he/she is not sitting in front of the keyboard. That way you can limit the damage that a remote attacker can do even if he/she manages to gain root. This gives you more security, but it also means that you can lock yourself out if you are not careful with your policies. Completely disabling SELinux is just a quick-and-dirty check to see if it is indeed the cause of your installation problems. The next step, as Ron has already pointed out, is to check the logs to find out which policy you have to relax, and to figure out how to relax it just enough to let the next slib upgrade happen without problems. The same goes for OpenOffice. It will probably still take a while until the default policies are optimized for all applications. One should probably also keep in mind that the primary purpose of SELinux is to improve the security of servers, therefore it will naturally be more of a hassle to make applications work which are normally not run on a server. -- Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer Florian | -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
