Thoughts from the abyss

I was working on an article this morning which required me to have a my Fedora 7 box e-mail me when a job completed. I installed Fedora 7 some time ago to run my Amarok music server, but never set up Postfix before. I kept trying to start Postfix and it would start, but then immediately die. I figure, oh, yeah, SELinux is getting in the road.

Instead of doing the typical thing I do, turning SELinux off and rebooting, I decided I’d figure out how to enable the damn thing. It’s quite easy, actually. I don’t know any command line SELinux syntax, but Fedora has a nice little GUI editor which I found the item in that I needed to enable.

Menu -> System -> Administration -> SELinux Management

Select Boolean and type “mail” in the filter. Then click the other tab below that. You should now see:

allow_postfix_write_local_mail_spool

Check this box, then click the status tab again. I then checked the re-label on next reboot button and exited. I rebooted the box and some SELinux gibberish started doing it’s voodoo.

I hope this helps someone else stuck like me for a little bit. One of these days I’ll sit down and try to learn some SELinux things, but for the meantime, this is very helpful to have the editor in Fedora 7. I’ve heard of another GUI editor, but the name of the project eludes me right now.