I’ve been vocal in the past about the need to not disable SELinux. Very vocal. However, SELinux can be difficult to work with. I was reminded of how difficult while deploying MySQL recently. Let’s take a look at how to iron out the SELinux configuration for MySQL, and how to deploy it with Puppet I will be using CentOS 6.6 in this article. The package names and SELinux information may vary if you use another distribution.

MySQL Design

Let’s review the design of the MySQL installation before continuing. For the most part, it’s a standard install, we’re not doing any elaborate tuning or anything. All the passwords will be ‘password’ (clearly you should change this in production!). All the anonymous users (@localhost, root@localhost, etc.) will have a password set. An additional ‘replication’ user is created so multiple databases can be replicated and example replication settings are included. The test databases are removed and a single user/database pair of wikiuser/wikidb will be created. We won’t do anything with the database, it’s just an example that can be duplicated as needed.

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