How to Disable SELinux on RHEL 6.3

SELinux is a good thing, but when sitting on a test machine, you might not be interesting in configure SELinux to have you application running smoothly, without running into SELinux. So here I will show you how to disable SELinux. Remember that this is NOT recommended for a production environment.

First check the current status of SELinux.

$ sestatus
SELinux status:                 enabled
SELinuxfs mount:                /selinux
Current mode:                   enforcing
Mode from config file:          disabled
Policy version:                 24
Policy from config file:        targeted

Now to disable SELinux. Open /etc/selinux/config and edit the below.

# 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=disabled

Now restart you system and run sestatus again to verify that you configuration changes had taken affect.

Reference

• RHEL Security-Enhanced Linux