SElinux filesystem relabel at boot problem

[Jonathan Underwood]

On 15/03/07, Peter Smith <peter.smith at utsouthwestern.edu> wrote:
> Did you go through the correct procedure to kick off the relabel?
> Creating the specially named file at the top of the root filesystem?  If
> it is relabelling, it will state that it is doing so at boot.  It will
> be quite obvious.  You can look at the startup scripts in /etc/rc.d/ to
> see what makes it happen (rc.local, rc.sysinit, rc).

Yes, I did all the correct things to trigger the relabel - i.e. in
system-config-securitylevel turned SElinux back to targeted, checked
that /.autorelabel file was there. The spew of error messages, avc
permission denied type things happen during the relabel. Prior to that
happening, I did notice something about not being able to mount /tmp,
but it flew off the screen too fast.

Anyway, to fix the problem I did this:
1) fixfiles -f relabel
2) touch /.autorelabel
3) reboot

And all was well again. I realize that there's redundancy there, but
1) allowed 2) to happen cleanly. What the problem was re3mains a
mystery though.