localpolicy.fc settings not always honoured

[Stephen Smalley]

On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 23:22 +0000, Ted Rule wrote:
> For a personal requirement, I was trying to tweak SELinux strict sources
> policy so that the OpenOffice main binary had a non-default label, i.e.
> "soffice_exec_t".
> 
> I found that despite setting the file_context override in
> localpolicy.fc, a restorecon kept flipping the file_context
> back to bin_t, implying that the loaded policy had ignored my
> localpolicy settings.

A couple of points:
- Conventionally, such local settings have been put into
file_contexts/misc/local.fc or file_contexts/misc/custom.fc.  The
contents of the misc subdirectory are put after the distros.fc file and
thus take precedence.
- A better way of doing this is to create
a /etc/selinux/$SELINUXTYPE/contexts/files/file_contexts.local file with
your local settings.  That doesn't require policy sources to be kept
around at all.  restorecon and other users of matchpathcon give
precedence to anything in that file if it exists.

-- 
Stephen Smalley
National Security Agency