How does SELinux affect the /home directory?
- by Matt Solnit
Hi everyone. I'm migrating a CentOS 5.3 system from MySQL to PostgreSQL. The way our machine is set up is that the biggest disk partition is mounted to /home. This is out of my control and is managed by the hosting provider. Anyway, we obviously want the database files to be on /home for this reason.
With MySQL, we did the following:
Edited my.cnf and changed the datadir setting to /home/mysql
Added a new "File type" policy record (I hope I'm using the right terminology) to set /home/mysql(/.*)? to mysqld_db_t
Ran restorecon -R /home/mysql to assign the labels
and everything was good.
With PostgreSQL, however, I did the following:
Edited /etc/init.d/postgresql and changed the PGDATA and PGLOG variables to /home/pgsql/data and /home/pgsql/pgstartup.log, respectively
Added a new policy record to set /home/pgsql/pgstartup.log to postgresql_log_t
Added a new policy record to set /home/pgsql/data(/.*)? to postgresql_db_t
Ran restorecon -R /home/pgsql to assign the labels
At this point, I still cannot start PostgreSQL. pgstartup.log says:
# cat pgstartup.log
postmaster cannot access the server configuration file "/home/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf": Permission denied
The weird thing is that I don't see any messages related to this in /var/log/messages or /var/log/secure, but if I turn off SElinux, then everything works.
I made sure all the permissions are correct (600 for files and 700 for directories), as well as the ownership (postgres:postgres).
Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong?
I'm using the Yum repository from commandprompt.com, version 8.3.7.
EDIT: The reason my question specifically mentions the /home directory is that if I go through all these steps for any other directory, e.g. /var/lib/pgsql2 or /usr/local/pgsql, then it works as expected.
