[WBEL-users] WBEL4, FAT32, and SELinux

[Daniel J. Summers]

I'm coming along pretty well with configuring this laptop.  The screen's 
running at 1280x800, the wireless LAN is working, sound is working, and 
I was even able to build Xine RPMs.  :)  I have been having some 
problems with FAT32, and also with Apache's configuration, and I'm 
wondering if the two aren't related to SELinux somehow.

On my old machine (running WBEL3), I had a 2GB hard drive (hdb1) 
formatted with FAT32.  On this drive, mounted at /mnt/drive_d and using 
my user and group, I had my MySQL data, my Thunderbird files, and the 
pages to be served by a web server.  I deleted the directory 
/var/www/html, and instead made it a symbolic link to 
/mnt/drive_d/wwwroot.  Everything worked swimmingly, whether the machine 
was booted to WXP or WBEL.

On this machine, whenever I try to bring httpd up, I get an error 
telling me that "DocumentRoot must be a directory".  I've tried 
modifying /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf to set the DocumentRoot to 
/mnt/shared/wwwroot (which is the new mount point for my larger FAT32 
partition), and I get the same error.  The reason I'm suspecting SELinux 
is that I know it has mandatory access controls, and I'm wondering if 
this may be preventing user "apache" from seeing directories and files 
that are mounted with "summersd" as an owner.  (This didn't seem to be a 
problem in WBEL3.)

Also, last night, I had ripped a CD, encoded it with ogg, and was then 
going to move the files from my home directory to a directory on 
/mnt/shared.  I was able to create two subdirectories (one for artist, 
one for album), but when I went to move the files, I got "Permission 
denied" on each one.  Again, this makes me wonder if SELinux is causing 
me problems.  If it's enabled, does it try to write its labels even on 
vfat partitions?  If so, can they handle that?

Along those lines, is FAT32 support *less* stable in this release?  
Twice, I have closed out a processes that were manipulating data on that 
partition, and then restarted the machine.  Twice, that partition has 
been corrupted.  (Once, I closed out e-mail, then rebooted - the 
"inbox.msf" file (Thunderbird's index of my inbox) was a zero length.  
The other time, I was moving a directory from /mnt/shared to 
/home/summersd, and once the copy was complete, I closed the windows and 
rebooted.  The directory was still there, along with over 2GB of space 
still allocated (it was a 4 GB directory).  Only rebooting in WXP was 
able to run a chkdsk that cleared the data out and gave me the space back.)

I've got a few other minor issues, but those will probably be another 
message.  Thanks for your help and advice!  :)

-- 
*Daniel J. Summers*
E-mail - 	daniel at djs-consulting.com <mailto:daniel at djs-consulting.com>
*Web Sites:*
Business -  	http://www.djs-consulting.com <http://www.djs-consulting.com/>
Personal - 	http://www.djs-consulting.com/personal 
<http://www.djs-consulting.com/personal/>


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