Turning off SELinux temporarily
Disabling SELinux temporarily is the easiest way to determine if the problem you are experiencing is related to your SELinux settings. To turn it off, you will need to become the root users on your system and execute the following command:
echo 0 > /selinux/enforce
This temporarily turns off SELinux until it is either re-enabled or the system is rebooted. To turn it back on you simply execute this command:
echo 1 > /selinux/enforce
As you can see from these commands what you are doing is setting the file /selinux/enforce to either '1' or '0' to denote 'true' and 'false'.
Configuring SELinux to log warnings instead of block
You can also configure SELinux to give you a warning message instead of actually prohibiting the action. This known as permissive mode. To change SELinux's behavior to permissive mode you need to edit the configuration file. On Fedora and RHEL systems that file is located at /etc/selinux/config. You need to change the SELINUX option to permissive like so:
SELINUX=permissive
Note that these changes will not take effect until the system is rebooted, which is why the first section comes in handy on a system you either cannot or do not want to reboot right now.
Completely turning off SELinux
To completely disable SELinux instead of setting the configuration file to permissive mode you set it to disabled like:
SELINUX=disabled
You will need to reboot your system or temporarily set SELinux to non-enforcing mode to create the desired effect like the example above.
This article was originally from:
http://www.revsys.com/writings/quicktips/turn-off-selinux.html
I wanted to archive it here in case it ever went away.. good article for selinux shortcuts