How to Disable Firewall on RHEL 6

In this post, i will show how to disable Linux Iptables Firewall on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6). A Linux firewall on RHEL 6 can be configured to filter every network packet that passes into or out of network. In some cases such as testing and development environment, you will need to disable the iptables firewall. To disable linux iptables firewall on RHEL6, you just to execute the following commands :

1. Before stop the iptables, save the firewall setting using the following command :

[root@rhel6 ~]# service iptables save
iptables: Saving firewall rules to /etc/sysconfig/iptables:[  OK  ]

2. Stop iptables using the following command :

[root@rhel6 ~]# service iptables stop
iptables: Flushing firewall rules:                         [  OK  ]
iptables: Setting chains to policy ACCEPT: filter          [  OK  ]
iptables: Unloading modules:                               [  OK  ]

3. To ensure that iptables will not started at boot time, pleas execute this chkconfig command :

[root@rhel6 ~]# chkconfig iptables off

4. If IPv6 firewall is enabled, please disable it using the following commands :

[root@rhel6 ~]# service ip6tables save
ip6tables: Saving firewall rules to /etc/sysconfig/ip6table[  OK  ]
[root@rhel6 ~]# service ip6tables stop
ip6tables: Flushing firewall rules:                        [  OK  ]
ip6tables: Setting chains to policy ACCEPT: filter         [  OK  ]
ip6tables: Unloading modules:                              [  OK  ]
[root@rhel6 ~]# chkconfig ip6tables off