Web Based Faxing and SELinux

Notes on using Red Hat Fedora for web-based faxing

When using web based faxing in Apache running on Red Hat Fedora, beware of Security Enhanced Linux, SELinux. Quoted from Red Hat: The security goal is to make sure that Apache HTTP is only reading the static Web content, and not doing anything else such as writing to the content, connecting to database sockets, reading user home directories, etc.

These limitations include using PHP's exec to run external applications that happen to use sockets, such as HylaFAX faxstat.

See /var/log/messages for any denials due to the SELinux policy. To disable SELinux:

• System, Administration, Security Level and Firewall, tabsheet SELinux
• click the Transition tree
• check Disable SELinux protection for Apache HTTP
• execute /etc/init.d/httpd restart