[Howto] Workaround failing MongoDB on RHEL/CentOS 7

MongoDB is often installed right from upstream provided repositories. In such cases with recent updates the service might fail to start via systemctl. A workaround requires some SELinux work.

Ansible Tower collects system data inside a MongoDB. Since MongoDB is not part of RHEL/CentOS, it is installed directly form the upstream MongoDB repositories. However, with recent versions of MongoDB the database might not come up via systemctl:

[root@ansible-demo-tower init.d]# systemctl start mongod
Job for mongod.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status mongod.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.
[root@ansible-demo-tower init.d]# journalctl -xe
May 03 08:26:00 ansible-demo-tower systemd[1]: Starting SYSV: Mongo is a scalable, document-oriented database....
-- Subject: Unit mongod.service has begun start-up
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
-- 
-- Unit mongod.service has begun starting up.
May 03 08:26:00 ansible-demo-tower runuser[7266]: pam_unix(runuser:session): session opened for user mongod by (uid=0)
May 03 08:26:00 ansible-demo-tower runuser[7266]: pam_unix(runuser:session): session closed for user mongod
May 03 08:26:00 ansible-demo-tower mongod[7259]: Starting mongod: [FAILED]
May 03 08:26:00 ansible-demo-tower systemd[1]: mongod.service: control process exited, code=exited status=1
May 03 08:26:00 ansible-demo-tower systemd[1]: Failed to start SYSV: Mongo is a scalable, document-oriented database..
-- Subject: Unit mongod.service has failed
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
-- 
-- Unit mongod.service has failed.
-- 
-- The result is failed.
May 03 08:26:00 ansible-demo-tower systemd[1]: Unit mongod.service entered failed state.
May 03 08:26:00 ansible-demo-tower systemd[1]: mongod.service failed.
May 03 08:26:00 ansible-demo-tower polkitd[11436]: Unregistered Authentication Agent for unix-process:7254:1405622 (system bus name :1.184, object path /org/freedesktop/PolicyKit1/AuthenticationAgent, locale en_

The root cause of the problem is that the MongoDB developers do not provide a proper SELinux</a configuration with their packages, see the corresponding bug report.

A short workaround is to create a proper (more or less) SELinux rule and install it to the system:

[root@ansible-demo-tower ~]# grep mongod /var/log/audit/audit.log | audit2allow -m mongod > mongod.te
[root@ansible-demo-tower ~]# cat mongod.te 

module mongod 1.0;

require {
	type locale_t;
	type mongod_t;
	type ld_so_cache_t;
	class file execute;
}

#============= mongod_t ==============
allow mongod_t ld_so_cache_t:file execute;
allow mongod_t locale_t:file execute;
[root@ansible-demo-tower ~]# grep mongod /var/log/audit/audit.log | audit2allow -M mongod
******************** IMPORTANT ***********************
To make this policy package active, execute:

semodule -i mongod.pp

[root@ansible-demo-tower ~]# semodule -i mongod.pp 
[root@ansible-demo-tower ~]# sudo service mongod start
                                                           [  OK  ]

Keep in mind that audit2allow generated rule sets are not to be used on production systems. The generated SELinux rules need to be analyzed manually to verify that it covers nothing but the problematic use case.