Disable firewall on Redhat

I just tried to deploy and test an application on EC2 running red hat but couldn’t telnet it.

I configured the security group to allow port 8080, I could see the port was running with netstat

sudo netstat -lntp

tcp 0 0 :::80 :::* LISTEN 29031/httpd
tcp 0 0 :::8080 :::* LISTEN 28923/java

However, try as I might I could not telnet. I didn’t have any issues with ssh. Finally I found the problem. Redhat instances have a firewall enabled by default. A quick way around the firewall is to disable it with a simple command:

system-config-firewall-tui

I’m sure there is a better way to solve this issue that doesn’t expose the server to attacks. I’d love to know.