SELinux – CentOS – Missing /etc/selinux/config

RedHat turns SELinux on by default because its safer. Nearly every vendor that uses Redhat-derived products turns SELinux off because they don't want to have to put in the time (and therefore money) to figure out why the thing doesn't work. The Redhat/Fedora people have put in a massive amount of time and effort making SELinux more of a viable option in the Enterprise, but not a lot of other organizations really care about your security. (They care about their security and the security reputation of their product, which is a totally different thing.)

If you can make it work, then go for it. If you can't, then don't expect a lot of assistance from the vendors out there. You can probably get help from the Redhat/Fedora guys, from the selinux mailing lists and #selinux channel on freenode. But from companies like Oracle -- well, SELinux doesn't really factor in to their business plan.

To check SELinux

sestatus

To see what flags are set on httpd processes

getsebool -a | grep httpd

To allow Apache to connect to remote database through SELinux

setsebool httpd_can_network_connect_db 1

Use -P option makes the change permanent. Without this option, the boolean would be reset to 0 at reboot.

setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect_db 1