Sorry for what are probably basic questions. I installed Fedora 17 with Gnome in my Dell Latitude 600 laptop a couple of days ago. Each time I turn it on I get a warning at the top of the gnome screen. When I open it, it says the following:

This source process : lspci

Attempted this access : sys_admin

Reading the info in the warning window it says if I really want to do this I should:

Do

Setsebool -P allow_polyinstantiation 1

My questions are what does all this mean and do I want to do what is suggested? From what info I have been able to find I believe it has something to do with the pci buss and system admin privileges. And I can't find anything about polyinstantiation. This is the first version of Linux I have ever been able to get up and running so obviously I am very much a newbie.

Thanks for any help you can give,
Carroll

OK I have been researching and trying to understand what is going on. I understand now that SeLinux is a security enhanced version of the Linux kernal. And I understand it works be keeping different parts of the OS from having unneeded access to the other parts of the OS. This prevents an infected or defective program from infecting or corrupting another program of the OS. Is this all correct? But I still don't understand why lspci is trying to access sys_admin. And I don't know if I should let it or not. Is this a bug in Fedora 17 or is it just the way my system is set up. Or is it even possibly a hardware problem.

Thanks for any help you can give,
Carroll

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=821268

It is a bug. There is an update to fix it or download the fix at the URL given on the bottom of the page.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi jschiwal,

Thank you for the suggestion. However when I tried to download the fix I got:
no package for selinux-policy-3.10.0-128.fc17

I tried it several times making sure I did not have any typos. It still didn't work. I then tried Yum extender which found the following package:

3.10.0-145.fc17

This package contains these files:

selinux policy configuration

selinux policy devel

selinux targeted base policy

Do you think I should install one or more of these files?
Thanks again for your help,
Carroll

Well I am not sure what happened but the problem seems to be fixed. I had to leave for a while and shut the computer completely down. When I booted it back up the problem did not come back. Apparently when I ran the command the first time it installed something through Yum that fixed the problem. Thanks for the info about the bug because trying to install the fix for the bug fixed my problem even though I got the message that said there was no package with that number. Thanks for the help.

Carroll

Now I am even more confused because the problem has come back. When I turned the computer on again the exact same error message came up. So I guess I am back to the question of will one of the files I listed in my previous post fix this problem or should I be looking for something else? Being totally new to Linux I am hesitant to download a file if I don't understand what it will do.

Thanks for any help you can give,
Carroll

This might be a good time to point out that Fedora is RedHat's bleeding edge R&D distro, & therefore this kind of thing is not unknown.
Its generally stable-ish, but its not supposed to be used for serious stuff eg at work.
If you want free RHEL+stable, go Centos or Scientific Linux.

Hi chrism01,

I understand that Fedora is a test bed for Redhat, however it is the first version of Linux that has installed and run without crashing on my laptop. It also found my wifi card and got it working without any major help from me except to tell the card to turn on. So to say the least I am highly impressed with Fedora 17 compared to the other distros I have tried.

Ok back to the subject of the thread, I did an update yesterday of several megs of data. Since that update I have turned the laptop off and back on several times. The error has not come back in any of those times. It appears the updates solved the problem. Thanks for the help.

Carroll