Disabling the crash kernel (and kdump) in CentOS/RHEL 6

Had a system where the user wanted to disable the crash kernel after a previous admin had enabled it.  I found a ton of write-ups showing how to enable and configure kdump, but few describing the opposite.

There are multiple approaches that work here, but for a quick win here’s what we did.

1. Edit /boot/grub/grub.conf
2. On the kernel line, find the text crashkernel= and set it to crashkernel=no
3. Do chkconfig kdump off
4. Reboot

If you don’t want to reboot, then you could do service kdump stop