The scenario is that I created a VM using VMware workstation 6 – allocated 30GB of space and then allowed the installation to complete. All looked well until I rebooted the VM.
During the boot sequence it stopped at the /etc/fstab stage and would not respond. The solution lead to wonder why more people hadn’t seen it.
A little bit of background. Some time ago I was migrating a SCO based application to Red Hat ES 4 on Dell hardware. During a conversation with Dell over an issue with Redhat – the technicial mentioned to me to disable the Selinux option. I asked why and the techie said “It works better – less problems – if you don’t need it – turn it off). So we did.
I did a bit of research and found
Security-enhanced Linux (SELinux) is an implementation of a mandatory access control mechanism. This mechanism is in the Linux kernel, checking for allowed operations after standard Linux discretionary access controls are checked.
which was not required in that particular project.
So when my latest problem occured I happened upon some information that suggested you could disable the selinux option through grub and editing the boot string used to start the VM.
Heck what have I got to lose I thought. So pressing a key during boot gets me into grub – e allows me to edit the string and using the down arrow I select the last part of the boot string and add selinux=disable and then press b to boot.
Lo and behold it boots and then I can use the System / Administration / Selinux to change the settings (in my case to off).