Disabling Firewall on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

*WARNING* only do this if you really really know what you are doing *WARNING*

*WARNING* if in doubt, check with your network or Linux administrator *WARNING*

In order to access my portal demo from outside the VMware in which it is running, I needed to disable the firewall on my Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2 (Tikanga) server.

This service ( known as IPTables ) can be temporarily stopped using the command: -

[root@voyager ~]# service iptables stop

( other subcommands are available; start|stop|restart|condrestart|status|panic|save )

and permanently disabled using the command: -

[root@voyager ~]# chkconfig iptables off

Given that I'm at runlevel 3 ( multiuser, no X11 ), I could have run the command as: -

[root@voyager ~]# chkconfig --level 3 iptables off

which would leave it running for other runlevels ( 2/3/4/5 are the defaults.

The current setting can be checked as follows: -

[root@voyager ~]# chkconfig --list | grep iptables

*WARNING* only do this if you really really know what you are doing *WARNING*

*WARNING* if in doubt, check with your network or Linux administrator *WARNING*