Internet (wireless) quits working after stopping iptables
 

recently while trying to get ultraVNC working from windows 7 to a Redhat 6 workstation, i needed to disable the Redhat firewal. The instruction to do that was

service iptables stop


This allowed me to connect RDP with ultraVNC but it stopped my internet on the linux workstation. Restarting iptables did not do the trick.

The wireless adapter still shows connected to the wireless network.

Any thoughts on why this stops my internet.

If you check your rules after stopping iptables, you might see that shutting the firewall down defaults to block all outside traffic.

iptables -L

You could manually open all traffic to get your connection going by doing:

iptables -A INPUT -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -j ACCEPT

That makes your firewall completely open to all traffic and your connection should work...but you'll want to build rules at some point to allow the connection without exposing your system to everything.