SELinux is unmanageable; just turn it off if it gets in your way
The problem is not so much that selinux is too complicated (it is as complicated as it needs to be), but that we all run software we don&#x27;t understand.<p>The whole IT ecosystem has become a hail mary. Even admins usually have no idea what a certain program actually wants to do. If the admin knows how to install the app so that it actually runs, you call them a good admin.<p>From a security point of view, an application is like a nuclear power plant. It&#x27;s good if it works as planned, but if something blows up it endangers your whole enterprise.<p>The whole container movement can be seen as putting the apps in a sarcophagus like Chernobyl. That way the radiation hopefully stays in, but history has shown that it really doesn&#x27;t. Also, the wheel of history has just turned one more iteration and now admins just view the sarcophagus as something you deploy as you previously deployed the app. Who is responsible that it is air tight? Well, uh, nobody, really.<p>You can&#x27;t even blame the applications for that. Let&#x27;s say you want to build a good, secure application. How do you know what files your application will try to open? What syscalls it wants to call? Library and framework functions tend to not document that properly.<p>Obscure files like &#x2F;etc&#x2F;localtime, &#x2F;etc&#x2F;resolv.conf, &#x2F;etc&#x2F;ld.so.conf, &#x2F;dev&#x2F;zero ... how can you expect devs to build well documented and well sandboxable applications if they don&#x27;t know which files their library functions will open?<p>You may have heard of &#x2F;etc&#x2F;resolv.conf ... but have you heard of &#x2F;etc&#x2F;gai.conf? &#x2F;etc&#x2F;nsswitch.conf? &#x2F;etc&#x2F;host.conf? Wouldn&#x27;t it be great if the man page of getaddrinfo mentioned those (mine only mentions gai.conf)