There is brief intro presentation on SELinux for “everyday” users. The 12th slides is titled “SELinux - the good”. It has quoted someone by the name Larry Loeb: Let me assure you that this action by the NSA was the crypto-equivalent of the Pope coming down off the balcony in Rome, working the crowd with a few loaves of bread and some fish, and then inviting everyone to come over to his place to watch the soccer game and have a few beers.

It was announced in August that the Fedora Project suffered a security breach. As a result after a certain date, all software updates were disabled. As of recently, the updates were enabled with new signatures in place. I recently updated my Fedora 9 32bit (i386) installation. The last time I updated my system was the last week of July, before the security announcement was made. The following are the steps I took to complete my update.

Using Firefox 3. Very simply, I know that Redhat’s main website (https://www.redhat.com) works perfectly fine. However when I exclude the “www”, and go to the same website: https://redhat.com, apparently something is wrong? I see Secure Connection Failed. (Should I be concerned???) So I click the “add exception link…” … which turns into button … So I click the “Add Exception…” Button … which opens a dialog So I click the “Get Certificate” Button So I can enable the “Confirm Security Exception” Button, so I can click on that.

Since upgrading to Fedora 9, I am trying much harder to work with SELinux. For the most part it is pretty easy. I am using passwordless SSH logins between my CentOS 5.1 server and my Fedora 9 desktop. Since my Fedora 8 never used SELinux, all my file contexts were “wrong” when I mounted my /home partition. I noticed the following error when I tried to ssh from my server to Fedora (I read /var/log/messages):