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How to disable selinux on your Asterisk system

SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux ) is a Linux kernel security module that allows administrators and users more control over access controls. It allows access based on SELinux policy rules.

SELinux is a great module, but sadly it doesn't work well with Asterisk. SELinux stops certain modules within Asterisk from running. This is why you always need to disable SELinux before you start installing Asterisk.

In today's blog post we are going to show you how you can disable the SELinux module on your centos 7 system.

To view the current SELinux status and the SELinux policy that is being used on your system, use the sestatus command:

$ sestatus

output
SELinux status:                                 enabled
SELinuxfs mount:                                /sys/fs/selinux
SELinux root directory:                         /etc/selinux
Loaded policy name:                             targeted
Current mode:                                   enforcing
Mode from config file:                          enforcing
Policy MLS status:                              enabled
Policy deny_unknown status:                     allowed
Max kernel policy version:                      31

You can see from the output above that SELinux is enabled and set to enforcing mode.

Temporary disabling SELinux

You can temporarily change the SELinux mode from targeted to permissive with the following command

$ sudo setenforce 0

This is however only valid for the current runtime session only.

Permanently disabling SELinux

To permanently disable SELinux on your CentOS 7 system, follow the steps below:

Open the SELinux config file

vim /etc/selinux/config

Make sure that you have installed the vim package on your Centos 7 system (yum install vim)

Set the SELinux mod to disabled

# 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
# SELINUXTYPE= can take one of these two values:
#       targeted - Targeted processes are protected,
#       mls - Multi Level Security protection.
SELINUXTYPE=targeted

Now save the file and reboot the system.

$ sudo shutdown -r now

Once the system has been rebooted you can check the SELinux status again with the following command.

$ sestatus

output
SELinux status:                 disabled

SELinux has now been disabled and you can install Asterisk 18 without any problems on your Centos 7 system.