[Libguestfs] [common PATCH 3/3] mlcustomize: do not relabel if not enforcing (RHBZ#1828952)

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 02:16:24PM +0200, Pino Toscano wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 September 2020 13:53:57 CEST Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > > Considering that /tmp is a general location for temporary files, it's
> > > common that files may end with a tmp_t-alike label when moved back to
> > > the destination place (e.g. after a rename()). That is not the only
> > > situation like this that I saw in the past.
> > > 
> > > In permissive mode, all these situation are logged in the audit log,
> > > yes, but they cause no blocks nor errors.
> > > 
> > > > It's also fine for an administrator to
> > > > switch a system to permissive and then back to enforcing without
> > > > relabelling or rebooting.
> > > 
> > > A mislabelled /etc/passwd is still read and used fine in permissive
> > > mode. Switch back from permissive to enforcing without a relabelling
> > > is generally not a good idea, especially after the system ran for a
> > > lot of time after the switch to permissive.
> > 
> > It's seems true from what you wrote above that someone could copy
> > /tmp/passwd -> /etc/passwd and it would have a wrong label.  But
> > virt-v2v could fix that label, which even in permissive mode sounds
> > like a win.
> 
> The question is: why? If the system had wrong labels even for system
> files, and the administrator did not bother/want to fix them (because
> of permissive), why should virt-v2v? Even if virt-v2v relabels a
> permissive guest, the labels will get out of sync once the guest runs
> again and does its own stuff, so there is no gain here.

I don't think this part is true (except in rather contrived situations).
It seems as if when setting the mode to Permissive when the guest is
running normally, it *is* attempting to maintain the correct labels.
So virt-v2v should do the same thing.

Rich.

> > My question is what's the down-side to relabelling in permissive mode?
> 
> Time spend doing something that is not useful/used for the guest.
> 
> -- 
> Pino Toscano



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