Well there we have it. Working on a production system lock down ssh and bang! Can’t ssh in any more. How many times have I told myself that I should have a cronjob that stops iptables after 5 mins so you can get in if you stuff it all up! Anyway for those of you who have typo-minded fingers drop the following in /etc/cron.d/iptables before you add or reload iptables:

*/5 * * * * root /etc/init.d/iptables stop

If you make a mistake cron (presuming its running) should stop iptables and you should be able to get back in. Don’t forget to remove it once your finished otherwise there isn’t much use in having iptables running in the first place.

Good luck!

For those of us who want to make modifications to some of the VMX configuration options under a VMware guest but don’t want to restart will be happy when you find out what the vmware-guestd can do! For example:

vmware-guestd –cmd “vmx.set_option synctime 0 1″

This command under a Linux VMware host will set the VMX synctime option to true (if it was previously disabled). This means that you don’t need to shutdown and restart your VM – excelent for production VMs. There are loads of additional VMX settings some are read-only but some are read-write.

I can’t confirm but I presume you can set the respective options under a Windows host also.

Over time we all loose (or miss-place) thing we need. Recently I have been asked about the locate command under Linux and have found one of the best explanations I have seen that has examples of locate and the find utility under Linux:

http://www.secguru.com/article/quick_tips_to_find_files_on_linux_file_system

Enjoy!