How to stop and disable auditd on RHEL 7 -

Environment

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

Issue

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How to stop and disable auditd on RHEL 7?

Resolution

Disable auditd temporarily (this will disable logging instantly but will not survive a reboot):

auditctl -e0

Disable auditd permanently (this will require a reboot):

systemctl disable auditd

Verification:

[root@dhcp182-79 ~]# auditctl -s
enabled 0     # <----- this means that auditd logging is disabled
failure 1
pid 478
rate_limit 0
backlog_limit 64
lost 0
backlog 0
loginuid_immutable 0 unlocked

Root Cause

auditd documentation

man auditd
(...)
       -e [0..2]
              Set  enabled  flag.  When  0  is passed, this can be used to temporarily disable
              auditing. When 1 is passed as an argument, it will enable auditing. To lock  the
              audit configuration so that it can't be changed, pass a 2 as the argument. Lock‐
              ing the configuration is intended to be the last command in audit.rules for any‐
              one  wishing  this feature to be active. Any attempt to change the configuration
              in this mode will be audited and denied. The configuration can only  be  changed
              by rebooting the machine.