Using chcon

By Joshua Erdman
Digital Foundation, inc.

This command is new to Linux and my lack of knowledge about it totally kicked my butt when I upgraded from my old RH 9.0 server to a Fedora Core 3 server. See a new file security layer called a 'context' has been introduced. A file's context descriptor defines what the file is intended for. So providing security settings (chmod) and ownership rights (chown) is now not enough. I know, in pure desparation I went so far as to:

chmod 777 /home/username/HTML -R
chown apache:apache /home/username/HTML -R

Too no avail. Then I came across Linux File Context security and it pointed me in the right direction (that was about 5 Tylenol and 8 Advil later... errr and countless beers).

So all I had to do was define the right context for Apache and it worked!

chcon -t httpd_sys_content_t

So just use the command:

chcon --help

To get more info. If you need to know what contexts are set on a file, you can always:

ls -scontext

Article last reviewed: 02/13/2005

Created by: Digital Foundation, inc.

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