why is iptables still filtering after i disable the firewall?

[Christopher Chan]

Karl Auer wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 09:42 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>>   then what would be the incantation for disabling iptables entirely?
>> i can only *guess* that this is what's causing my problem as i can't
>> think of any other reason for not being able to ping out.
> 
> You can't "disable iptables" short of rebuilding your kernel. However,
> you can tell iptables to filter nothing:

I think not loading the netfilter modules would be pretty much disabling 
iptables.