Book Image

SELinux Cookbook

By : Sven Vermeulen
Book Image

SELinux Cookbook

By: Sven Vermeulen

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
SELinux Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using strace against daemons


The strace application not only makes sense for command-line applications but also for daemons. A popular approach to debugging daemons is to start them from the command line, possibly with a specific debug flag, so that the daemon doesn't detach and run in the background. However, this is often not possible on SELinux: the policy will not allow the daemon to run as a command-line foreground process.

How to do it…

The approach to use strace against daemons is similar as with command lines, focusing on the process ID rather than the command:

  1. Find out what the process ID of the daemon is:

    ~$ pidof postgres
    2557
    
  2. Use strace to attach to the running process:

    ~$ strace -o strace.log -f -s 256 -p 2557
    
  3. Specify which system calls to watch out for. For instance, permission issues while binding or connecting to ports or sockets can be filtered as follows:

    ~$ strace -e poll,select,connect,recvfrom,sendto -o strace.log -f -s 256 -p 2557
    
  4. Press Ctrl + C to interrupt the strace...