Re: [patch 0/4] libsemanage: genhomedircon replacement

[Daniel J Walsh <dwalsh@redhat.com>]

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Karl MacMillan wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 14:51 -0400, Stephen Smalley wrote:
>> On Tue, 2007-08-28 at 12:37 -0400, Daniel J Walsh wrote:
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>>> Karl MacMillan wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 2007-08-28 at 10:21 -0400, Joshua Brindle wrote:
>>>>> Daniel J Walsh wrote:
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>>>>>> Finally catching up on Email after vacation.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> genhomedircon lists the entire list of passwords in order to figure out
>>>>>> where home directories are.  Not just the contents of the seusers.
>>>>>>
>>>> And this will simply not work with LDAP infrastructure - iterating over
>>>> tens-of-thousands of users on _every_ workstation is not acceptable.
>>>>
>>>>> Is there an implementation error in the new genhomedircon?
>>>>>
>>>>>> At RedHat we have about 50 different root home directories
>>>>>>
>>>>>> /home/location/dwalsh
>>>>>>
>>>>>> We need to know this in order to have restorecon work properly.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Labeling of the homedir for things like .mozilla .gnome2 and .ssh
>>>>>> is still needed, but differentiating them on Roles does not make sense
>>>>>> in a distributed world.  Where if dwalsh logs into a kiosk machine he
>>>>>> might be xguest_t, on a terminal server guest_t, on his local machine
>>>>>> unconfined_t and on the security machine staff_t.  If his home directory
>>>>>> is the same on all of these, SELinux is in trouble.
>>>>> So, it doesn't make sense for your specific infrastructure, that doesn't 
>>>>> mean it doesn't make sense ever. And this is a policy issue really, 
>>>>> genhomedircon just does what its told.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> Can we turn the question around then? Where would this behavior be
>>>> useful? And would the per-user labeling and constraints I suggested work
>>>> in those situations as an alternative? Again, we can leave genhomedircon
>>>> for all I care, I just want to have the defaults work in most
>>>> situations.
>>>>
>>>> Karl
>>>>
>>>>
>>> I believe ldap will stop you from returning the entire database anyways,
>>>  Since it is threshold limited.  I had bugreports of genhomedircon
>>> taking forever to run with large password database > 100,000.  This is
>>> where the compiling of the regex saved tons of time.
>> Looking at the genhomedircon code, it seems that the only reason
>> genhomedircon walks the entire user database is to try to find all home
>> directory path prefixes in order to generate appropriate default
>> patterns for ordinary user_t users, and that this behavior could be
>> disabled with the genhomedircon script by passing --nopasswd or -n to
>> the script, in which case it would only use the default home directory
>> prefixes defined by /etc/default/useradd and /etc/libuser.conf plus the
>> hardcoded defaults of /home and /export/home.  In the libsemanage
>> re-implementation of genhomedircon, this can still be specified by the
>> caller, but there isn't presently a way to set the desired value in
>> semanage.conf right now.
>>
>> So, the passwd walk has nothing to do with per-role labeling of user
>> home directories but rather is just about discovering home directory
>> locations for default labeling, and you need it if you want to ensure
>> that all user home directories are labeled with appropriate types even
>> if they all use the same set of types.  So what is your solution again?
>>
> 
> Interesting - thanks for unwinding this. It seems _much_ more reasonable
> to provide a mechanism for adding home directory locations manually via
> semanage.
> 
> Karl
> 

How about we run this one time at install.  And then default to off.
Allow users to regenerate if they come upon a problem or a full relable?

BTW, I thought I stated a few weeks ago the purpose of the walk was to
find home directories.
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