SSHD and Selinux

In Summary: Turn off SELinux. ALWAYS.

Sorry for the huge text, I just spent an hour in Fedora trying to get my firewall to allow SSHD to operate. No matter what I did, it would not work. Finally I disabled the firewall completely for debugging purposes, but it still wouldn't work! The error messages were no help!

Then, after raging at the machine for an hour, it dawned on me. This was a fresh install of Fedora. I hadn't disabled SELinux.

I can't believe how many times SELinux has bitten me in the ass. It never seems to work for anything good, but always hinder people. I consider myself a very advanced Linux User and I find it overly cumbersome. There needs to be a less.... ogre-like system put in place by default, like Ubuntu's Apper. That never got in my way BUT EVERY FLIPPING TIME SELinux has got in my way.

On systems with SELinux disabled, the SELINUX=disabled option is configured in /etc/selinux/config:

# This file controls the state of SELinux on the system.
# SELINUX= can take one of these three values:
#       enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced.
#       permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing.
#       disabled - No SELinux policy is loaded.
SELINUX=disabled

Go do this now. You will thank yourself. I've never heard of SELinux benefitting the average user. Ever. Ever ever ever. I'm sure someone in a corporate environment has had luck though, but they have someone on retainer there to babysit this monstrousity. And I pity that person.

A weird tale of SELinux, Firefox and Jaunty Remix woes

Foreward
Here is an unusual story I experienced many months ago. First let me tell the reader what you are about to read is not normal. I have never heard of SELinux behaving like it did with me here, and I have used it for several years before and since this incident with no problems. (Though I have switched to using AppArmor based on recommendations from Ubuntu). I have also never had this problem since it happened.

The Story
Back on April 7th 2009, I installed Kubuntu Jaunty 9.04 KDE3 remix.

I did all the update and upgrades and grabbed all the new kernal goodness. Then I installed SELinux and rebooted. Upon reboot, I found something (SELinux I can only guess) had DESTROYED all the Japanese text in my filenames. It turned them into complete garbage and I don't know why, because this has never happened before. (I assume it did this during its scan of my hard-disks.)

In general I favor running SELinux and I don't believe this behavior is normal (especially since I have run it before and since with no more problems). I am thinking it was perhaps a problem with the package of SELinux itself from Ubuntu.

This type of file corruption would be a major catastrophe except that I am such a good person for backing files up, so I was able to recover from most of it.