SELinux - a question about external drive after upgrade

[Daniel J Walsh]

Mike wrote:
> I have a question related to something I had not thought about before...
> 
> I have an external USB drive that has been used for quite some time as a 
> backup drive attached to a machine that has SELinux disabled. Other machines
> in the LAN are backed up to the same external drive using rsync to the machine
> on which the external drive is attached. So there are no security contexts
> for files on the backup drive.
> 
> Some of the other local machines are now upgraded to F9 running SElinux enabled, 
> but of course the backups produce files on the external drive without any
> SELinux context information, since the machine that writes then has SELinux
> disabled!
> 
> So the question arises - if the main machine is then upgraded to F9 with
> SELinux enabled - what will happen to backup files when the original external
> drive is plugged in and used?
> 
> Will the filesystem on the external drive need to be relabelled once the machine
> on which it is attached has been upgraded?  If so what is the cleanest and safest
> way to get the whole system using SELinux?
> 
> 
> 
You can easily lay context down by running restorecon on the USB drive
at the mountpoint.  Or just set it up to mount the disk with a countext.
 Something like system_u:object_r:removable_t:s0.