SELinux preventing login (Fedora 16)

[Braden McDaniel]

On Wed, 2012-04-11 at 17:27 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 03:37:45PM -0400, Braden McDaniel wrote:
> > On Wed, 2012-04-11 at 15:25 -0400, Daniel J Walsh wrote:
> > > Are you booted with SELinux in permissive mode of disabled?
> > 
> > I'm booted with it disabled:
> > 
> >         # cat /etc/selinux/config | grep disabled
> >         #     disabled - No SELinux policy is loaded.
> >         SELINUX=disabled
> > 
> > > ausearch -m avc
> > 
> > That's long; I'll attach it.
> 
> You might want to try this as root first, after saving your work:
> 
>   touch /.autorelabel ; reboot

I did that previously; but it didn't seem to help. (Perhaps because I
still had SELinux disabled when I did it?)

> Running SELinux disabled is unnecessary.  Running in permissive mode
> is much better, since it allows you to switch back and forth without
> labeling problems.
> 
> When you run in disabled mode, SELinux labels aren't written to the
> disk when files are created, so when you try to turn SELinux on later,
> it results in lots of denial errors.  Permissive mode does pretty much
> the same thing as enforcing mode, but any denials are ignored, so
> SELinux won't prevent access.

That's likely how I got myself into this.  I had disabled it while
attempting to troubleshoot something else.  I probably installed and/or
updated some packages before I remembered to turn it back on.

So I changed to "permissive" and did the autorelabel thing again.  This
time I was able to zero in on some messages that were likely pertinent;
and the SELinux troubleshooter suggested:

        setsebool -P authlogin_nsswitch_use_ldap 1

I'll continue to run "permissive" for a little while longer and see if
that fixes it.

-- 
Braden McDaniel <braden at endoframe.com>