security context not preserved

[Jonathan Berry]

On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 14:38:06 -0500, G. Vincent Castellano
<gvc at ocsystems.com> wrote:
> I've installed Fedora Core 3 (Intel) and am getting distrcting messages when
> moving data from an NFS mounted filessytem.  The NFS server is a Fedora Core 1
> machine and the native filesystem type is ext3.  When I do a move, I get a
> message like:
> 
> mv: warning: security context not preserved `/mnt/sound4/mvdir.done': Operation
> not supported
> 
> where 'mvdir.done' is the file being moved and /mnt/sound4 is the NFS mount.
> I've found nothing about this in the archives or in Google.  The move is
> performed correctly, but when I move a directory tree I get one message for each
> file, and I'm concerned that legitimate error messages will get buried.  The -f
> flag doesn't suppress the message.  The filesystem is exported with
> norootsquash, and it makes no difference whether I'm doing the mv as root or
> normal user.  The client machine is configured for SE-Linux (for no particular
> reason, it's behind a firewall) and I suspect that may be related.
> --gvc
> 

It seems to me to be an issue with SELinux.  A "security context" is
something from SELinux, though that's about all I know about it.  The
FC3 machine has SELinux enabled, so the files have extra attrributes
needed for SELinux.  The FC1 NFS machine does not have SELinux
support, so it cannot handle the extra overhead needed.  Thus you
loose information when copying files to the NFS mount.  I figured
there might be issues moving files between an SELinux distro and a
non-SELinux distro, so I disabled it.  This seems to be what is going
on, but I don't have any knowledge of SELinux or how to stop these
messages, aside from not using SELinux, or upgrading the NFS server.

Jonathan