SELinux Exim Problem

Didar Hossain didar.hossain at gmail.com
Wed Sep 9 06:51:42 UTC 2009


On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 4:02 AM, John Horne<john.horne at plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-09-07 at 06:38 -0400, Daniel J Walsh wrote:
>>
>> Probably some api that exim is calling is looking at the mounted file
>> systems which is causing it to look at /boot.
>>
>> I think we can allow this for now.
>>
> Okay, I've done some investigating of this and can see what is happening
> now.
>
> Exim has 4 config options which check for disk space or inodes when a
> message arrives. These are unset by default, but I had set one of them
> ('check_spool_space').
>
> Exim checks the space/inodes by calling statvfs, which in turn looks
> at /proc/mounts for mounted partitions. It then checks the mounted
> partitions.
>
> In my case I have 3 other partitions, and was receiving the same selinux
> errors for those. I reset their selinux context to that of /usr (since
> there is nothing of particular importance in those partitions). This
> stopped selinux reporting about those partitions.
>
> However, I still get errors about /boot, and obviously cannot reset its
> context. I removed the exim config option (mentioned above), but it
> seems that exim will also check on available space if a sending mail
> server sends a message and uses the SIZE option to the SMTP MAIL
> command. (I tested this and it is correct.) There is no way to disable
> this.
>
> So, the problem comes down to exim checking disk space/inodes to ensure
> it can accept a message, and this is perfectly reasonable. To do this
> the system checks the currently mounted partitions.

Agreed.

> However, and I don't
> know why, selinux objects when exim checks the /boot partition. I
> suspect an selinux boolean may be required to allow exim to look
> at /boot.

But, why check "/boot"? As far as I understood from the statvfs(2), it
accepts a path to get the information. "/boot" is not something that
Exim will use as a spool directory. Or am I missing something!?

> (When I installed F11 I used ext4 for the root partition, so I had to
> create a separate /boot partition using ext3.)
>
>
>
> John.
>
> --
> John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK
> Tel: +44 (0)1752 587287    Fax: +44 (0)1752 587001
>
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