Today we had a customer that needed to perform a first generation server to next generation migration however they cannot have SELinux enabled during this process.

I explain to the customer how to disable this, it’s pretty simple.

vi /etc/sysconfig/selinux

SELINUX=enforcing

Needs to be changed to

SELINUX=disabled

Job done. A simple one but nonetheless important stuff. If you wanted to automate this it would look something like this;

sed -i 's/SELINUX=enforcing/SELINUX=disabled/g'/etc/selinux/config

This sed oneliner simply swaps SELINUX=enforcing to SELINUX=disabled, pretty simple stuffs. It will work on CentOS6 and 7 anyway, and should but I can’t guarantee work on CentOS 5.