We learned a lot so far about using Puppet to secure your systems as, well as how to use it to make groups of systems more secure. However, in all of that, we've not yet covered some of the basic OS-level functions that are available to secure a system. In this chapter, we'll review several of those functions.

SELinux is a powerful tool in the security arsenal. Most administrators experience with it, is along the lines of "how can I turn that off ?" This is born out of frustration with the poor documentation about the tool, as well as the tedious nature of the configuration.

While Puppet cannot help you with the documentation (which is getting better all the time), it can help you with some of the other challenges that SELinux can bring. That is, ensuring that the proper contexts and policies are in place on the systems being managed.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics related to OS-level security tools: