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Running a Shell in a Daemon Domain

allow unconfined_t logrotate_t:process transition;
allow logrotate_t { shell_exec_t bin_t }:file entrypoint;
allow logrotate_t unconfined_t:fd use;
allow logrotate_t unconfined_t:process sigchld;

I recently had a problem with SE Linux policy related to logrotate. To test it out I decided to run a shell in the domain logrotate_t to interactively perform some of the operations that logrotate performs when run from cron. I used the above policy to allow unconfined_t (the default domain for a sysadmin shell) to enter the daemon domain.

Then I used the command “runcon -r system_r -t logrotate_t bash” to run a shell in the domain logrotate_t. The utility runcon will attempt to run a program in any SE Linux context you specify, but to succeed the system has to be in permissive mode or you need policy to permit it. I could have written policy to allow the logrotate_t domain to be in the role unconfined_r but it was easier to just use runcon to change roles.

Then I had a shell in the logrotate_t command to test out the post-rotate scripts. It turned out that I didn’t really need to do this (I had misread the output of an earlier sesearch command). But this technique can be used for debugging other SE Linux related problems so it seemed worth blogging about.

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