"Can't get there from here..."

["Robert G. (Doc) Savage" <dsavage@peaknet.net>]

Some of you know that I'm having quite a time restoring a CentOS 7 Samba fileserver to full operation. The underlying hardware is a 2010-vintage Dell T110 server.

Something has been buggering up the SELinux contexts on the root filesystem. This has lead to permissions problems that prevented access to key files required to bring up important services and daemons.

The last time I "fixed" it by booting from a Fedora 33 Live DVD. Part of its boot-up discovery process appears to have found and fixed an SELinux problem. Thereafter, the MATE graphical desktop came up normally. Following a manual upgrade of almost two thousand RPM packages, the desktop again failed. This time it simply goes dark. I can interrupt the GRUB boot and force the kernel into runlevel 3 with no problem. Unfortunately the underlying hardware/firmware does not support using "growisofs" to write an ISO image to a DVD-R disk.

Tomorrow I'll re-try booting with a Fedora 33 Live MATE DVD, and see if it detects and corrects the SELinux problem. The server itself is too old to support booting that image from a thumb drive. Dang it.

--Doc