ChezLark

I repaved my home Linux box last weekend to upgrade it from Red Hat 9 to Fedora Core 5 after concluding that attempting to upgrade it in place was madness.

Imagine my delight when I set up samba identically on FC5 and found that it didn’t work; I couldn’t mount my shares from my Windows clients; /var/log/messages showed errors like this:

audit(1105232730.949:0): avc: denied { getattr } for pid=Xxx exe=/usr/sbin/smbd path=/samba dev=hdb1 ino=blablabla scontext=root:system_r:smbd_t tcontext=system_u:object_r:default_t tclass=dir

So, what’s the problem? I’ll tell you what the problem is: out of the box, the new Secure Linux (SELinux) features on Fedora Core 5 break samba. As though sharing files with Windows boxes isn’t a primary usage scenario for Linux!

Googling turns up lots of people simply suggesting turning off SELinux either alltogether, or for samba specifically, as a fix. I’m lazy and my box is on an internal network, so that’s what I did. But go read these instructions (or these) for how to get samba to actually work properly and tell me that this is all as it should be. Or this discussion.

My personal conclusion: Linux still has too many sharp edges on it for casual use by mortals.