It's amazing how bad things have got with the majority of developers and admins that they refuse to learn things that are difficult and instead simply turn it off. It's not like all of them are too young to remember when nothing in their system was easy and they actually had to learn about what they were doing.

While I agree with your sentiment, I think I have tried to give selinux a fair chance, but I've reached the point where it seems to add more overhead than it benefits us. This is combined with, I'm also likely making mistakes with my configuration, that make it too permissive, because with my limited understanding, I'm putting together modules that make my stuff work, but I don't actually understand the implications of some of the decisions I'm making for permissions.

And my entire team seems to be struggling with selinux, and a little bit fed up with it, because we keep running into it blocking things, simple things, against our intuitions of the way our system and selinux should work.

It might be the perfect access control system, but to me UX is horrible. Or maybe I just hate to admit it, but I've utterly failed at building a mental model for how it works, and how I can effectively interact with it to do what I need to do.

So while you might be right, at least in the case of selinux, I'm not sure I agree that it's simply a matter of developers and admins refusing to learn things that are difficult. In the selinux case, I think it goes deeper, where it creates a cognitive load, that someone needs to invest a significant amount of effort to truly learn it.

This is of course difficult to get right - one would need to be aware of what everything does detail, but still know what it would be like to use it with no prior knowledge.

Sure, apparmor has fewer options, but it's trivial to manage a profile along with the package itself. The learning and reporting system is much simpler. And there's no need for debugging the "where did I miss the context setting this time" problem in deployment.

I can deal with both and either one is needed. But selinux simply wastes my time way too often.

To benefit from SELinux, I don't think you need to "truly learn" it... but you do need to invest some effort developing troubleshooting skills that are specific to SELinux. But the thrust of your point is right. We need to invest some effort to benefit from it.

I think postings like RedHat's are useful because they show us in a concrete way why it might be worth the small effort to develop the troubleshooting skills, or even worth the large effort to really understand SELinux.

I'm too young to remember how it was in the old times (would be glad to hear a story or 2), but since my very first job, the internal policy (the real one - not the one presented to customer or auditors) has always been "scew firewall, selinux, principle of least privilege. Disable everything so it works right now and grant the dev team root access to the prod environments - they need it for an urgent customer issue!".

I think one of the big things that has impacted SELinux adoption is that everyone has sort of seen it as a proactive booster rather than a really necessary part of a secure environment. I'm sure a lot of that is because lots of people are used to administering systems that were around before SELinux (and similar) was. For something that's perceived as a bonus point, it interferes far too often.

Most people don't realize SELinux is on until it does something really bad like stopping a database from restarting correctly or otherwise harming what's supposed to be a stable environment. When those are the stakes, SELinux does not have, or at least does not make immediately clear, a sufficient value proposition to incentivize the admin to fix the rules rather than just turning the whole thing off.

For example, to contrast with the OP, when SELinux stops Docker from doing something, the impulse is not going to be "Yay, SELinux stopped Docker from doing something dangerous! Thank you glorious SELinux!" Instead, it will be "Ugh, SELinux again getting in the way of stuff. I just need to disable that. I get enough headaches from Docker as-is and SELinux probably just isn't modern enough to handle my uber-charged stack with all of it's new-fangled features. Disabling!"

In either case, enterprise IT doesn't have the benefit of spending time fiddling that used to exist.

And much of the extra work is one-time work, not ongoing effort.

I wish I could do this with our Logstash cluster. It requires so much hand-holding, and troubleshooting can be quite opaque. Last night the logstash indexing service had 'just stopped', and was sending 57000-character-long json loglines into its own log.

And if they do fix a bug, you can't just upgrade one component, you have to upgrade logstash and elasticsearch and kibana... and maybe whichever beats you're using.

I've had all sorts of weird errors over the years when I set up new CentOS machines.. one thing or the other. And then I remember to turn off SELinux, and it suddenly works. Over and over again.

It's going to take a lot of convincing to get me to leave SELinux on when it's caused so many problems over the years.

Yeah, SELinux does require learning it, but it adds a lot. I recently helped a friend of mine fix his PHP CMS because it was hacked. The PHP was high jacked and it started attacking other instances in hosting providers network. If only he had not turned off SELinux, it would have prevented outgoing connections from the http server.