Comments on: How to Disable SELinux Temporarily or Permanently

By: Ravi Saive

Ravi Saive — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 04:43:40 +0000

In reply to col. @Col, Sounds like something got corrupted — rc.sysinit is from the old SysV days, so if it “disappeared” it’s probably not what’s actually breaking things. The real issue is initrd.service: that file isn’t hand-written, it’s generated when the initramfs is built. Fix is usually: boot from a live USB, chroot into your system, and rebuild the initramfs (dracut -f on Fedora/RHEL, mkinitcpio -P on Arch, etc.). Also make sure systemd is still installed — reinstalling it from the rescue environment will restore the missing init binary. No internet makes it harder, but with the install media you can usually recover.

By: col

col — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 11:06:30 +0000

Thanks, Aaron, it seems pretty easy to do. Just a shot in the dark: I had my system running at about 50% capability for two days, and then, my system removed the info in rc.sysinit. Even worse, it completely removed the initrd.service unit. It no longer works.

[Unit]  
[Service]  
[Install]

Do you happen to know what normally goes into that unit? Right now it won’t boot to systemd, so I can’t use all the usual tools (like systemctl dependencies or unit names) to fix things. init is also gone, and I can’t find an alternative init to spawn. No internet access on this system either, since I’m trying to fix it offline. No harm in asking.

By: JB

JB — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 03:36:56 +0000

In reply to Cliff.

SELinux is an abomination. It’s a set of cryptic commands with overlapping, inconsistent effects. Shut it off and hope for the day it gets replaced with something that is actually easy to use.

By: Cliff

Cliff — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 12:52:30 +0000

You should take this article and all like it down! You might as well tell your readers to remove their perimeter firewalls down, uninstall their Anti-Virus on Windows, etc. SELinux is NOT that hard to use and configure. If fact, if you just follow some basic SELinux rules, like keeping all your web server content in /var/www you won't have any issues. If you are having an issue use the tools that are given like audit2why and audit2allow. Using audit2allow will fix 99.99999% of your SELinux issues. f you have lots of violations switch to permissive mode (better on a test Machine) and dig through the logs. That's what competence administrators do! Advising people to disable SELinux is as stupid as advising them to "just make the user a local administrator, and they will fix it." on a Windows computer.

By: Ravi Saive

Ravi Saive — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 05:13:06 +0000

In reply to Jim.

@Jim,

SELinux is not part of Debian-based distributions, you need to install it.

$ sudo apt install selinux selinux-utils selinux-basics auditd audispd-plugins
$ sudo sestatus