Fedora Core 4

I finished my second upgrade to Fedora Core 4. Not everything is ironed out yet with the build of course. But one thing is for sure a lot has happened to the RedHat I knew before.

I must say of all the changes, for me the nicest addition is the new SELinux extensions. For deep background on the reasons for and theory of SELinux read, The Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed Assumption of Security in Modern Computing Environments

The more I work with SELinux the more I realize I need to know about it, and how exactly it does all its stuff. It certainly changes things relating to users, directories and access. As I am starting to learn it, I'm sure I'm doing things the hard-way. :)

The major difference, so far for me, in Red Hat's SELinux is the way ftp is handled. vsftpd is still the server which is great. However, it seems to be designed to run as a daemon rather than invoked via xinet.d. If you grab a working copy of the xinet.d file for vsftpd you can invoke it via xinet.d wrapper. I did my first server upgrade in this manner. The current one I am trying as a daemon. I certainly think I will miss some of the features that the xinet.d wrapper brings, and may yet return to it.

Of all the issues I saw most notable is if you want to enable chroot directory's outside of the normal /home/xxx vsftpd. These will fail with a

500 OOPS: cannot change directory: /mnt/xxxxx

I was able to use ftp if I logged in with an account with a directory in /home, but once I set a user account to have a home drive outside of /home (in this case on a mounted secondary disk) vsftpd barfs the above.

I found information at the NSA that indicates you can disable SELinux protection of the ftp daemon.

setsebool -P ftpd_disable_trans 1

This seems a bit drastic. It certainly works for now though.

I think ultimately the issue resides with policies, but as SELinux policies are new to me, it will take time before it all gets sorted out. As I spend time with the new SELinux extensions in Fedora Core 4 I will keep you updated on my thoughts and configuration lessons.

Till Next Time,

Sean Riley
President, DogRiley