SVN + SELinux + Apache == Problems

[Colin Walters]

On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 22:04 -0500, Jerry Dueitt wrote:
> I have been trying to get a SVN repository set up for access via the
> DAV module. I have read that you need to do various things to get this
> to work on a Fedora Core 3 system. My repository lives in
> /projects/svn-repos/ which is a local filesystem. I have changed group
> and owner to apache for all files in that directory with chown -R
> apache.apache /projects/svn-repos. This obviously didn't work due to
> SELinux security contexts. I found online that I needed to do chcon -R
> -h -t httpd_sys_content_t /projects/svn-repos.

Right.

> I still get the following errors in my /var/log/mesages:
> Apr 12 21:50:39 fry kernel: audit(1113360639.475:0): avc:  denied  {
> search } for  pid=7147 exe=/usr/sbin/httpd name=/ dev=dm-2 ino=2
> scontext=root:system_r:httpd_t tcontext=system_u:object_r:file_t
> tclass=dir

Is /projects a mount for separate LVM device?  It must be labeled.  If
ls -Z /projects shows file_t, then that is the problem.

Try this:

chcon -t usr_t /projects 

I picked usr_t because it's going to be accessible to httpd_t.  Longer
term once we have a better infrastructure for local policy
modifications, you'd really want to create a new type such as project_t
which you could apply to the directory and give only httpd_t and other
domains the access you want.

> Most of the information online indicated people were just turning off
> SELinux to avoid this problem. I was wondering if anybody could point
> me in the direction of resolving this without disabling SELinux.

It's much better to disable SELinux enforcement just for Apache HTTPD,
not SELinux as a whole.
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/selinux-faq-fc3/index.html#using-s-c-securitylevel