Simplicity is a form of art...

After SELinux System Administration, now the SELinux Cookbook

Almost an entire year ago (just a few days apart) I announced my first published book, called SELinux System Administration. The book covered SELinux administration commands and focuses on Linux administrators that need to interact with SELinux-enabled systems.

An important part of SELinux was only covered very briefly in the …

Showing return code in PS1

If you do daily management on Unix/Linux systems, then checking the return code of a command is something you'll do often. If you do SELinux development, you might not even notice that a command has failed without checking its return code, as policies might prevent the application from showing …

Gentoo Hardened august meeting

Another month has passed, so we had another online meeting to discuss the progress within Gentoo Hardened.

Lead elections

The yearly lead elections within Gentoo Hardened were up again. Zorry (Magnus Granberg) was re-elected as project lead so doesn't need to update his LinkedIn profile yet ;-)

Toolchain

blueness (Anthony G …

Switching to new laptop

I'm slowly but surely starting to switch to a new laptop. The old one hasn't completely died (yet) but given that I had to force its CPU frequency at the lowest Hz or the CPU would burn (and the system suddenly shut down due to heat issues), and that the …

Some changes under the hood

In between conferences, technical writing jobs and traveling, we did a few changes under the hood for SELinux in Gentoo.

First of all, new policies are bumped and also stabilized (2.20130411-r3 is now stable, 2.20130411-r5 is \~arch). These have a few updates (mergers from upstream), and r5 also …

Gentoo Hardened July meeting

I failed to show up myself (I fell asleep - kids are fun, but deplete your energy source quickly), but that shouldn't prevent me from making a nice write-up of the meeting.

Toolchain

GCC 4.9 gives some issues with kernel compilations and other components. Lately, breakage has been reported with …

Segmentation fault when emerging packages after libpcre upgrade?

SELinux users might be facing failures when emerge is merging a package to the file system, with an error that looks like so:

>>> Setting SELinux security labels
/usr/lib64/portage/bin/misc-functions.sh: line 1112: 23719 Segmentation fault      /usr/sbin/setfiles "${file_contexts_path}" -r "${D}" "${D}"
 * ERROR: dev-libs/libpcre-8.35::gentoo …

Multilib in Gentoo

One of the areas in Gentoo that is seeing lots of active development is its ongoing effort to have proper multilib support throughout the tree. In the past, this support was provided through special emulation packages, but those have the (serious) downside that they are often outdated, sometimes even having …

D-Bus and SELinux

After a post about D-Bus comes the inevitable related post about SELinux with D-Bus.

Some users might not know that D-Bus is an SELinux-aware application. That means it has SELinux-specific code in it, which has the D-Bus behavior based on the SELinux policy (and might not necessarily honor the "permissive …

D-Bus, quick recap

I've never fully investigated the what and how of D-Bus. I know it is some sort of IPC, but higher level than the POSIX IPC methods. After some reading, I think I start to understand how it works and how administrators can work with it. So a quick write-down is …