The SELinux Symposium proper finished yesterday, with another WIP session, then some interesting applications of SELinux talks, and finally, talks on MLS. It’s interesting to see the conference evolve from being mostly about research and theory, to having an increasing orientation toward case studies and similarly practical topic areas.

Daniel Frye, an IBM VP, gave the second keynote and highlighted the growth of Linux as an enterprise OS from a security point of view, and the persistent challenge to make security compelling outside of the public sector.

Something which should help general users is setroubleshoot, which is now shipping in the RHEL5 and Fedora distros. It was developed by John Dennis, who gave a talk at the symposium. setroubleshoot detects when SELinux encounters a problem and tries to explain it to the user and provide a course of action to follow. It does this by popping an alert up in the system tray and optionally sending an email notification:

The symposium concluded with the usual drawing of prizes, this time including iPods, SELinux books, RHEL5, a Mac Mini and a HP laptop. Guess which one everyone wanted.

Today is the Developer Summit: a focused discussion on current and future directions by around twenty of the core developers.

In the photo, Karl MacMillan (2nd from the left) is talking, which is not unusual.