Bug 426428

Summary:	RFE: do not use hardlinks
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Michal Jaegermann <michal>
Component:	system-config-network	Assignee:	Nils Philippsen <nphilipp>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	rawhide	CC:	djuran, raytodd
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	FutureFeature
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Enhancement
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2016-08-11 10:16:15 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Michal Jaegermann 2007-12-20 23:00:04 UTC

Description of problem:

Let say that on a machine exist multiple "netprofiles" and at
least some of them have "fixed" arrangements (otherwise it would
be hardly any reason to have these various profiles, wouldn't it?).
Now if you will switch to such profile then /etc/resolv.conf,
and other files too, become hard links to corresponding files
in subdirectories /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/.
So far so good.

Now if you will switch on selinux then in /var/log/messages the
following entries start to show up over and over:

restorecond: Will not restore a file with more than one hard link
(/etc/resolv.conf) No such file or directory

with interspersed from time to time

restorecond: Will not restore a file with more than one hard link
(/etc/resolv.conf) Invalid argument

and also, for a good measure,

restorecond: Will not restore a file with more than one hard link
(/etc/resolv.conf) Success

although the last variation is relatively infrequent.

I have no idea what and why periodically calls restorecond and
why /etc/resolv.conf, and apparently not other hard links, make
it unhappy.  Maybe because a label on it ends up as
system_u:object_r:net_conf_t:s0
while other files in /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/ appear
to sport system_u:object_r:etc_t:s0?  None of that was set
"by hand".

Quite possibly this is a selinux fault but apparently some
coordination is missing here.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
system-config-network-1.4.3-1.fc8
selinux-policy-3.0.8-68.fc8
policycoreutils-2.0.33-2.fc8

How reproducible:
all the time in unpredictable intervals

Comment 1 Ray Todd Stevens 2007-12-31 03:53:01 UTC

I have this happening on several machines.

Comment 2 Ray Todd Stevens 2007-12-31 03:56:52 UTC

From what I can tell at least one of the issues here is that the
system-config-network is using hard links to have the running configuration in
/etc/system-config/profiles and the corresponding files in actual use be the
same files.   If it is sure that it needs to do this (Which I question), why not
use symlinks.

Comment 3 Ray Todd Stevens 2008-12-23 19:20:11 UTC

As of this date in fc10 this is still not fixed, and it is breaking other thing, (minorly)

Comment 4 Ray Todd Stevens 2009-01-05 20:00:57 UTC

This causes problems a lot of places.  I am wondering if the RFE: should not be removed, as this is closer to being an actual bug.

Comment 5 Ray Todd Stevens 2009-11-30 17:27:40 UTC

This is still a bug causing problems and still exists in fc12

Comment 6 Michal Jaegermann 2009-11-30 18:05:48 UTC

That seems to work exactly the other way around in bug 542420.  I am past of beeing confused.

Comment 7 Ray Todd Stevens 2009-11-30 19:45:46 UTC

I think this has maybe something to do with network manager.   Of course I also have yet to see a purpose for network manager in the first place.

Comment 8 Ray Todd Stevens 2010-01-10 23:33:12 UTC

This bug has caused be to have to do two different scratch reinstall and reload data from backup to recover from system crashes.

Comment 9 Ray Todd Stevens 2010-02-05 22:39:12 UTC

This is still causing problems with selinux not being able to fix problems with permissions.

Comment 10 Ray Todd Stevens 2010-11-04 04:08:28 UTC

This is also still a problem.       Of course a big part of the problem is that selinux doesn't seem to handle hardlinks at all well.

Comment 11 Ray Todd Stevens 2011-06-02 14:49:07 UTC

This is still a problem in FC14.   We need to change the version from rawhide.   We also need to get some work on this, as it causes regular problems.   Most of these problems are hidden and hard to diagnose.    Of course it would be nice if selinux could handle files with this kind of hardlinking to.

Comment 12 Fedora Admin XMLRPC Client 2012-12-19 15:29:41 UTC

This package has changed ownership in the Fedora Package Database.  Reassigning to the new owner of this component.

Comment 13 Nils Philippsen 2016-08-11 10:16:15 UTC

Thanks for taking the time to submit this request for enhancement.
Unfortunately, I haven't gotten around to implement this feature, sorry for
that.

Because I don't actively develop system-config-network anymore, I won't likely
find the time to work on this ticket, so I'll close this bug now.