Re: dump/restore and SElinux security context problem

Kayvan A. Sylvan wrote:

Hi everyone.

I was trying to upgrade from FC4 to FC5, but my root partition was too small
to accomodate the DVD image. So, I had to resize some partitions. GNU parted
was useless in that task (see Redhat Bugzilla Bug 90894).

Finally, I used "dump" to create a snapshot of a filesystem, then, using
the FC5 DVD to boot into rescue mode, used "restore" to recreate it.

The problem: during the restore, for every file, I get messages like this:

    restore: lsetxattr ./System.map-2.6.15-1.1833_FC4 failed: Invalid argument

This feels like it's related to SELinux. In fact, looking at
the restored files with "ls -Z", I see that they are all unlabeled.

If I don't use the rescue CD, and instead, on a running system where SELinux
is enabled, do the following:

1) setenforce 0
2) restore from the dump.
3) setenforce 1

Then, the restored files are in their correct security context.

How do I get this same result (files completely restored, along with
their extended attributes) while using the rescue CD?

Hi Kayvan,

Interesting problem. Why is it important that you use the rescue CD?
Why can't you just do a fresh install of FC5 and then do a restore?

My end goal is to be able to do a dump, boot into a rescue mode,
resize partitions, format new filesystems and restore the dump, and have
all files retain all their attributes (including their SELinux context
information).

Guus.

--
A.J. Bonnema, Leiden The Netherlands,
user #328198 (Linux Counter http://counter.li.org)