SELinux for dummies

I gave a course at the SELinux Symposium on using SELinux in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

http://people.redhat.com/dwalsh/SELinux/Presentations/ManageRHEL4.pdf

http://people.redhat.com/dwalsh/SELinux/Presentations/ManageRHEL5.pdf

After the talk, I was amazed at how many people came up to me and said they wish they had this talk before some of the more advanced talks.

In the early 80's when I went to college, Holy Cross, computers were the big thing on campus. Everyone thought they had to take a computer class in order to understand computing. Problem was that the college only offered PL1/Fortran classes. So we had lots of liberal arts students taking PL1 and Fortran classes so they would know what this computing thing was all about. They came away from the experience thinking that computing was hard. Of course I got a lot of free beer, for helping them write their programs. :^)

We are doing the same thing with SELinux. So let's take a step back and talk about some of the fundamentals of SELinux, from my point of view.