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You're reading from  Mastering Linux Security and Hardening

Product typeBook
Published inJan 2018
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ISBN-139781788620307
Edition1st Edition
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Donald A. Tevault
Donald A. Tevault
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Donald A. Tevault

Donald A. Tevault - but you can call him Donnie - got involved with Linux way back in 2006, and has been working with it ever since. He holds the Linux Professional Institute Level 3-Security certification, and the GIAC Incident Handler certification. Donnie is a professional Linux trainer, and thanks to the magic of the internet, teaches Linux classes literally the world over from the comfort of his living room. He's also a Linux security researcher for an IoT security company.
Read more about Donald A. Tevault

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Troubleshooting with setroubleshoot


So, you're now scratching your head and saying, "When I can't access something that I should be able to, how do I know that it's an SELinux problem?" Ah, I'm glad you asked.

Viewing setroubleshoot messages

Whenever something happens that violates an SELinux rule, it gets logged in the /var/log/audit/audit.log file. Tools are available that can let you directly read that log, but to diagnose SELinux problems, it's way better to use setroubleshoot. The beauty of setroubleshoot is that it takes the cryptic, hard-to-interpret SELinux messages from the audit.log file and translates them into plain, natural language. The messages that it sends to the /var/log/messages file even contain suggestions about how to fix the problem. To show how this works, let's go back to our problem where a file in the /var/www/html directory had been assigned the wrong SELinux type. Of course, we knew right away what the problem was because there was only one file in that directory...

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Mastering Linux Security and Hardening
Published in: Jan 2018Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781788620307

Author (1)

author image
Donald A. Tevault

Donald A. Tevault - but you can call him Donnie - got involved with Linux way back in 2006, and has been working with it ever since. He holds the Linux Professional Institute Level 3-Security certification, and the GIAC Incident Handler certification. Donnie is a professional Linux trainer, and thanks to the magic of the internet, teaches Linux classes literally the world over from the comfort of his living room. He's also a Linux security researcher for an IoT security company.
Read more about Donald A. Tevault