Pervasive Code

SELinux is a recently added security system that’s installed by default with CentOS 5.1 (and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and others). Since it’s newer than the classic “Discretionary Access Control” Unix security model, it’s not nearly as well documented, and unfamiliar to many. I had never even heard of it until this week.

After a lot of reading about it, and debating disabling it entirely, I figured out how to do some minor SELinux customization to fit my needs for a MySQL database server. Hopefully this will help folks who are in a similar situation.

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I’m working on a project that is deploying on CentOS 5.1, and I found it not entirely obvious how to install a really stripped down server, as a starting point for a lean and mean, hardened production server. Since I’m doing work on this at home on VMWare, and it’s being deployed on a VPS initially (and probably will remain virtualized for ease of management as it scales up), this guide is specifically aimed at this kind of configuration.

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In short, gain with minimal pain, a couple of small hitches. I went single-core to dual-core with a drop-in replacement CPU and it was almost as easy as replacing the batteries in a flashlight.

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I have a VPS hosted at RimuHosting.com. I waited a while (3 months) for bugs to be squashed before upgrading it to Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (”Gutsy Gibbon”). There was one new issue.

BTW, my non-Rimu home server was the first thing I updated. Notes are here.

The only Xen wrinkle is that you need the libc6-xen package. I don’t know if that’s in Feisty or not. In my case I experienced a slew of scary Segmentation Fault errors in the package configuration stage. I found :this post which contains a solution for the problem. But if possible you might want to try installing that package before upgrading. If that doesn’t work, just use the method described in that post.

After doing that and running dpkg --configure -a, it was okay. It did complain about AppArmor and being unable to do something with modules, but that seems to be not germane to Xen so I ignored it and rebooted, and everything seems fine.

A few weeks ago I updated to the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. This is the 7.10 (meaning October 2007) release, called “Gutsy Gibbon”. I encountered a couple of serious issues early on, but now that these are resolved things are running well. I’ll describe the issues and solutions so that anyone else encountering them can easily overcome them.
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