A co-worker recently came to me with an interesting and mysteriousproblem. He was setting up a Red Hat Enterprise 4 based machine withMySQL, using a default setup except he'd changed the location of MySQL'sdata directory from /var to a different partition. Now MySQL wasn'tstarting properly.

The symptoms were really funny: the init.d script installed by thesystem didn't work, except if he ran it by hand with ' sh -x ', it did.So

SELinux is one of those things that have been cropping up on my radarever since I had to start telling the Red Hat installer not to turnit on. (I kept not enabling it because changing an entire securityarchitecture of a system is not to be done lightly, even when it'sa new system I'm setting up.)

SELinux is an imposing system with equally imposing documentation.Fortunately, recently Dan Walsh of Red Hat has been posting some veryuseful (to me) 'SELinux for beginners

I've been thinking about a question recently: why is installing mostLinux distributions so much easier and friendlier than installingSolaris 9 on a standalone machine? (I can't speak for Solaris 10, as Ihaven't tried to install it on anything.)

(It's not just an issue of comparing today's technology against Solaris9's 2001 or so era technology; I was doing Linux installs in 2001, andit was still much better back