Last week, I needed to move /home from one Fedora computer to another, and I used rsync over ssh move the data.
On the new system, I noticed that procmail didn’t seem to be working, and neither did Dovecot. Nor could apache serve up my files. This had all been working on my previous Fedora system, which was running SELinux, as was my new system. What had happened?
I hadn’t told rsync to bring across the SELinux file contexts, which are stored in extended attributes. Here is the rsync option I should have used:
-X, –xattrs
I could have used ‘tar’ to move my home directory as well. In that case, I would have needed one of the following options: `–selinux` or `–xattrs`
I resolved my SELinux issues using the excellent [SETroubleShoot](https://fedorahosted.org/setroubleshoot/), which explained what commands to run to restore the proper SELinux contexts on various files.
SELinux requires time to tune, and I use it because it enhances the security of my linux system, which serves up content over HTTP (Apache), IMAP (dovecot) and CIFS (Samba).