IPFW lockout.

James Bowman Sineath, III sineathj1 at citadel.edu
Sun Sep 4 18:04:32 PDT 2005


> Hi all,
>
> I have a small problem on one of my dev boxes. I have a bod bootup ipfw 
> rulset and I find myself locked out of the machine.
>
> There will be a technician at the NOC on Tuesday that will be able to 
> assist me.
>
> My question is: Will he/she be able to simply reboot, logon as root as 
> normal?
>
> - and then -
>
> disable IPFW in rc.conf ... or will the loopback rule not being present 
> cause more mahem than I think it will?
>
> -Grant

He should be able to login without any problems.

On another note, in the future whenever you make changes to your system that 
could potentially lock you out, use crontab to disable them after a short 
amount of time. For example, when I was reconfiguring sshd, I crontab'ed 
'killall sshd && sshd -f /root/sshd_config_old' and moved the default config 
file to my /root directory. Also when playing with my ipfw rules, I 
crontab'ed 'ipfw disable firewall' for every 15 minutes until I got it 
working the way I wanted too.

Be VERY careful with this though. Don't use it and then forget to remove the 
lines from your /etc/crontab. Remove them as soon as you get it configured 
the way you want too. This is obviously a serious security risk, so don't 
use it very often. If you are worried about disabling your firewall, then 
create a small ipfw script to deny all connections except from your IP 
address and crontab that instead of 'ipfw disable firewall'. Also keep in 
mind to enable your firewall again you will need to type 'ipfw enable 
firewall'.

Bow Sineath
Class of 2006, the Citadel
sineathj1 at citadel.edu - bow.sineath at gmail.com 




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