Network Unreachable error on new RHEL 6.3 installation

I installed RHEL 6.3 on a new server.  On "firstboot" it was unable to connect to Red Hat to register for updates.

Further testing shows that most applications cannot reach the Inet (Firefox, Curl, etc) but the problem is NOT network connectivity.  For example, when I try something like curl XXXXX.ca:80 (my test HTTP server) I get an error:

-->> Failed to connect to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: Network is unreachable -- although I can connect properly to this same server if I give its local (192.168...) IP address.  Even ping won't work if the address is not on the internal LAN.

This looks like a hardware firewall problem so I plugged in my laptop on the same cable, set the IP to the same as the server, and can go anywhere I want.  This is expected since the boundary firewall does not restrict outgoing connections to anywhere.
 

My guess is that RHEL by default sets up a software firewall and that it has the wrong rules but so far I haven't found anything in the documentation and a search of the RH knowledge base comes up blank, as does a wider Google search.  "iptables" isn't listed on the process list.

I have checked all the config files that I know are network related without success.

NetworkManager is running but from the documentation doesn't seem to affect any of this.

Does anyone have any ideas what I set up wrong?  If there is a software firewall, then how do I disable it and what is its name?  In this environment it is not required.

Regards

John