Open Source Geek

OK, so Dropbox isnt 100% Open Source but Im a pragmatic kinda guy and I do love Dropbox. However it (Dropbox) doent seem to like SELinux it seems.

I know its so tempting to reach for the “turn off SELinux” switch but wait, its actually very simple to make SELinux allow Dropbox to work.

It turns out that Dropbox tries to do some naughty stuff that SELinux is there to protect us from – namely executing out of the memory buffer. This type of thing is usually done by programs trying to do malicious things on the system and happily SELinux protects us from this – but that prevents Drop from running.

How to Fix It

There is a nice and simple way to fix this and no I dont mean disable SELinux

There is a boolean that you could flip that turns off this protection – namely allow_execstack

sudo setsebool allow_execstack 1

However this is going way to far as you all now allowing any process to execute from stack, which isnt a good idea.

The best way is to tell SELinux that you just want Dropbox to be able to do this and nothing else. The way that you do this is you label the executable file, in this case /usr/bin/dropbox, as type execmem_exec_t

You can do this with a quick chcon, but thats not the best way to do it, the following two lines will fix Dropbox to work with SELinux

sudo semanage fcontext -a -t unconfined_execmem_exec_t /usr/bin/dropbox
sudo restorecon -v /usr/bin/dropbox

Now if you take a look at the SELinux contetxt of the file, you can see its got the right label

ls -lZ /usr/bin/dropbox
-rwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:execmem_exec_t:s0 /usr/bin/dropbox

If you spend a little time to understand the basics of SELinux (file contexts and booleans) you will find it is quite straight forward to work on a system with SELinux turned on

If you are interested in learning more about this stuff, check out the Dan Walsh blog

OSG