Re: PHP and PostgreSQL 9.0, pg_connect fails to connect

On 4/27/2011 12:24 PM, Michael Nolan wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 10:42 AM, Thomas Harold <thomas-lists@nybeta.com
> <mailto:thomas-lists@nybeta.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 4/27/2011 9:16 AM, Thomas Harold wrote:
>
>         - SELinux is running, but there are no denied messages in
>         /var/log/audit/audit.log and no setroubleshooting alerts in
>         /var/log/messages either.
>
>
>     Well, interestingly enough it is SELinux getting in the way, but not
>     logging anything.  Temporarily disabling SELinux suddenly makes it work.
>
>     # echo 0 > /selinux/enforce
>     (things now work)
>
>
> This does not surprise me, I've been upgrading a server to Fedora 14 and
> fighting SELInux every inch of the way.  Setting up PostgreSQL on that
> box is coming up on the schedule, maybe forewarned is forearmed. :-)

I've been using SELinux since '07, it still surprises me sometimes.
Most issues come from mislabeled files (which gets fixed with "semanage
fcontext" and "restorecon") and the targeted policies in RHEL5 are
pretty bug-free after this many years.  Of course, I just submitted a
bug report against the SELinux policy for vsftpd this past month, so
it's not perfect yet.

In this case it took a full day for the lightbulb to go on and a few
lucky searches later I found / remembered the booleans.   The only thing
that perplexes me at the moment is why SELinux is not logging an AVC
denial in the audit.log file for that particular issue.  I've seen it
log AVC denials for mislabeled files, so the system is not 100% broken,
it just was failing in this particular case.

(As a follow up note: In order to make a boolean change permanent, I had
to add the "-P" option to "setsebool".  Things stopped working again
after I restarted the server until I flipped the boolean again.

# setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect_db on

Happily, everything now seems to be working with the PHP software
package that I was configuring.)