Bug 623466

AFAICT, the first occurrence was during a massive update on Aug 7, 2010.

Snippet from /var/log/messages-20100808:
Aug  7 14:56:25 maple yum[4236]: Installed: bzip2-1.0.5-6.fc12.i686
Aug  7 14:56:26 maple yum[4236]: Installed: pcre-7.8-3.fc12.i686
Aug  7 14:56:27 maple setroubleshoot: SELinux is preventing /usr/sbin/groupadd access to a leaked /dev/null file descriptor. For complete SELinux messages. run sealert -l 351f77ca-8fef-4d62-a53d-aed11492d410
Aug  7 14:56:29 maple yum[4236]: Installed: grep-2.6.3-1.fc13.i686
Aug  7 14:56:33 maple yum[4236]: Installed: lua-5.1.4-4.fc12.i686

The context is now:
$ ls -Z /dev/null
crw-rw-rw-. root root system_u:object_r:null_device_t:s0 /dev/null

NB: This system was a clean F13 net install using all default settings for a Gnome desktop configuration on a laptop.

I can attach logs if needed.

Whoops! Those log messages say "Installed", not "Updated". I now remember doing an non-standard yum install to another partition in an experiment to try installing without anaconda.

# history | grep groupinstall
  147  yum groupinstall Base --installroot=`pwd` --releasever=13

The other partition was previously formatted and mounted.

Something was wrong (maybe udev problem) and /dev/null was mislabeled. Now it has right context and it will work.

(In reply to comment #3)
> Something was wrong (maybe udev problem) and /dev/null was mislabeled. Now it
> has right context and it will work.    

I easily reproduced this bug as suggested in comment 2.

mkdir fake_root
cd fake_root
sudo yum groupinstall Base --installroot=`pwd` --releasever=13

The mislabelling is in fake_root/dev:

[stephent@walnut fake_root]$ ls -Z dev
-rw-r--r--. root root unconfined_u:object_r:device_t:s0 null
-rw-r--r--. root root unconfined_u:object_r:device_t:s0 stderr
[stephent@walnut fake_root]$ ls -l dev
total 4
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  0 Aug 12 09:43 null
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 45 Aug 12 09:43 stderr
[stephent@walnut fake_root]$ 

Snippet from /var/log/messages:
Aug 12 09:38:35 localhost yum[6293]: Installed: libacl-2.2.49-6.fc13.x86_64
Aug 12 09:38:36 localhost yum[6293]: Installed: 2:shadow-utils-4.1.4.2-8.fc13.x86_64
Aug 12 09:38:36 localhost kernel: type=1400 audit(1281631116.450:29492): avc:  denied  { write } for  pid=6507 comm="groupadd" path="/dev/null" dev=dm-4 ino=4073123 scontext=unconfined_u:system_r:groupadd_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 tcontext=unconfined_u:object_r:device_t:s0 tclass=file
Aug 12 09:38:37 localhost yum[6293]: Installed: 1:dbus-1.2.24-1.fc13.x86_64
Aug 12 09:38:37 localhost yum[6293]: Installed: 1:findutils-4.4.2-8.fc13.x86_64

I guess I would say this is a yum/rpm error.  Although I am not sure how I would fix this.  Rpm needs to be faked out that the chroot path is eliminated.

I may have narrowed this down a bit.
It looks like dev/null with the wrong security context is created when
device-mapper-libs is installed.

Procedure:

mkdir fake_root
cd fake_root

In a new terminal window run:
watch -n 1 'ls --lcontext dev 2>&1'

Start the install:
sudo yum install --installroot=`pwd` --releasever=13 device-mapper-libs

When it completes, dev/null exists:

$ ls --lcontext dev
total 0
-rw-r--r--. 1 unconfined_u:object_r:device_t:s0 root root 0 Aug 13 07:01 null


device-mapper-libs-1.02.44-1.fc13.x86_64

Just seems like a very strange context to get created. Wait it is created as a file rather then a device.

Maybe rpm and yum are working correctly but post install scripts are causing these files to get created as files.

mkdir -p fake_root/dev
sudo mount -o bind /dev fake_root/dev
cd fake_root
sudo yum groupinstall Base --installroot=`pwd` --releasever=13

Should work

This might be an example of where we would want yum/rpm to not put down labels, like with mock.

(In reply to comment #8)
> Maybe rpm and yum are working correctly but post install scripts are causing
> these files to get created as files.    

In the chroot environment during the install, the "filesystem" package creates /dev, but /dev/null does not exist, so the first script that opens /dev/null could end up creating it as a regular file.

> Wait it is created as a file rather then a device.

They both are regular files:

[stephent@walnut fake_root]$ cat dev/stderr
The default plymouth plugin () doesn't exist
[stephent@walnut fake_root]$

Yes I figured this out.

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