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SELinux System Administration

You're reading from   SELinux System Administration Effectively secure your Linux systems with SELinux

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Product type Paperback
Published in Dec 2016
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781787126954
Length 300 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
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Author (1):
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Sven Vermeulen Sven Vermeulen
Author Profile Icon Sven Vermeulen
Sven Vermeulen
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Table of Contents (11) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Fundamental SELinux Concepts FREE CHAPTER 2. Understanding SELinux Decisions and Logging 3. Managing User Logins 4. Process Domains and File-Level Access Controls 5. Controlling Network Communications 6. sVirt and Docker Support 7. D-Bus and systemd 8. Working with SELinux Policies 9. Analyzing Policy Behavior 10. SELinux Use Cases

Switching SELinux on and off

This is perhaps a weird section to begin with, but disabling SELinux is a commonly requested activity. Some vendors do not support their application running on a platform that has SELinux enabled. System administrators are generally reluctant to use security controls they do not understand or find too complex to maintain. Luckily, this number is diminishing, and SELinux is also capable of selectively disabling its access controls for a part of the system rather than requiring us to completely disable it.

Setting the global SELinux state

SELinux supports three major states that it can be in: disabled, permissive, and enforcing. These states are set in the /etc/selinux/config file, through the SELINUX variable. Take a look at the current setting:

$ grep ^SELINUX= /etc/selinux/config
SELINUX=enforcing

When the system init process loads the SELinux policy, the SELinux code checks the state that the administrator has configured. The states are described as follows:

  • If...
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