Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 119649
Selinux, unable to login after kernel update (2.6.4~) via yum
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:39 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040207 Firefox/0.8 Description of problem: After using 'yum update' (from kernel-2.6.3-2.1.253.2.1 to kernel-2.6.4-1.300) and rebooting, could not login to KDE as normal user or root. Gave an error about being unable to find home directory, not being able to write to /, and that "$test_filehome:ambiguous redirect". Also, on command line, could not 'ls' in /mnt or /lost+found as normal user, gave the flashing red text. And, strangely, as root, did not have permission to save 'inittab' from within nano. Also could not 'touch' in /etc. Saving to another file, removing the original 'inittab', and then renaming new file to 'inittab' worked. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.4-1.300 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. yum update from vanilla test2 system with KDE 2. reboot 3. try to login to KDE Actual Results: kicked back to gdm. Expected Results: able to login Additional info: I was able to circumvent this issue by setting 'SELINUX=disabled' in /etc/sysconfig/selinux. But, since selinux is now disabled, it's not really a permament solution... There must be some other selinux step I'm missing that needs to be run after updating the kernel?
this page explains this issue and a fix. http://people.redhat.com/kwade/selinux/selinux-faq/selinux-faq-en/ "Q:. I installed Fedora Core on a system with an existing /home partition, and now I can't log in. A:. Your /home partition is not labeled correctly. You can fix this by labeling /home correctly /usr/sbin/setfiles /etc/security/selinux/file_contexts /home You will need to have the policy-sources package installed to use setfiles. Alternately, you can use the fixfiles utility to relabel /home without having to install policy-sources. " Basically this is not really a bug, but if I was a new user this would be a major issue.
Closing this as NOTABUG.