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These are blog entries written by the UNIX Health Check development team. Our team has extensive technical experience on both AIX and Red Hat systems, and we like to share our knowledge with our visitors.

Topics: Red Hat / Linux, Security, System Admin

Disabling SELinux

Security Enhanced Linux, or short SELinux, is by default enabled on Red Hat Enterprise (and alike) Linux systems.

To determine the status of SELinux, simply run: 

# sestatus
There will be times when it may be necessary to disable SELinux. Or for example, when a Linux system is not Internet facing, you may not need to have SELinux enabled.

From the command line, you can edit the /etc/sysconfig/selinux file. This file is a symbolic link to file /etc/selinux/config.

By default, option SELINUX will be set to enforcing in this file: 
# This file controls the state of SELinux on the system.
# SELINUX= can take one of these three values:
#     enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced.
#     permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing.
#     disabled - No SELinux policy is loaded.
SELINUX=enforcing
By changing it to "permissive", you will disable SELinux: 
SELINUX=permissive




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