SELinux concerning /home symlink?

[Paul Howarth]

On Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:54:51 +0000 (UTC)
Mike  <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mike <mike.cloaked <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > Thanks everyone - I will try bind mounting this evening....
> 
> I got the /home pointing to /opt/Local/home just fine - but ...now
> doing mail:
> 
> Having just been pretty pleased with myself for getting my system
> running I now find a problem.... This question was also posted to
> Fedora list.
> 
> First I have my home directory bind mounted from /home
> to /opt/Local/home with no problems, and I bind mount using an fstab
> entry like /opt/Local/home   /home   ext3 bind 0 0 
> 
> The context for /home is system_u:object_r:home_root_t:s0
> and for /opt/Local/home it is the same.
> 
> The mount works fine during boot - so I tried the same with my mail.
> 
> I have an fstab entry
> /opt/Local/spool/mail /var/spool/mail   ext3 bind  0 0
> 
> The context for /var/spool/mail is system_u:object_r:mail_spool_t:s0
> and for /opt/Local/spool/mail it is also the same.
> 
> I can manually do
> mount /var/spool/mail  and the bind mount works fine.
> 
> However on boot I get an avc denial, with kernel: type=1400 and
> and avc: denied {mounton} .... comm="mount" path="/var/spool/mail"
> dev=sda5 ino=419655 scontext=system_u:system_r:mount_t:so 
> tcontext=system_u:object_r:mail_spool_t:so class=dir
> 
> I am not sure what to change to make this work?

First temporarily unmount the bind mount:
# umount /var/spool/mail

Then change the context of the original /var/spool/mail to make it
suitable for use as a mount point:
# chcon -t mnt_t /var/spool/mail

Mount at boot should now work. You can simulate this without actually
rebooting by doing:
# service netfs start

Cheers, Paul.