iptables lockout

[Drenriza]

Currently i am working on setting up a Raspberry PI (Raspbian OS / Debian Wheezy) as my new firewall device,
and lets just say that i have locked myself out more than once so far in the project over the ssh connection.

So my question is.
Is their a script / package you can use that prompts or in some other way ask if the user is still present.
Which you need to respond to in some manner, or it after x amount of minutes execute the command

sudo iptables-restore < /path/to/rules.txt

So i dont loose the connection to the device and need to move a physical screen connection to it.

Thanks on advance.

[Lars Noodén]

You could use an at job or iptables-apply to avoid losing the connection. If you want the permissions looser than that, just turn off the firewall.

sudo iptables-save > /tmp/good.iptables.rules
sudo sh -c "echo '/sbin/iptables-restore < /tmp/good.iptables.rules' | at now + 4min"

That gives you a few minutes to try things.

Using iptables-apply is easy too.

sudo iptables-apply /tmp/test.rules

See the manual page for all the options including adjusting the timeout.