Happened to me in work once… I was connected via SSH to one of our test machines, so I could test connection disruption handling on a product we had installed.
I had a script that added iptables rules to block all ports for 30 seconds then unblock them. Of course I didn’t add an exception for port 22, and I didn’t run it with nohup, so when I ran the script it blocked the ports, which locked me out of SSH access, and the script stopped running when the SSH session ended so never unblocked the ports. I just sat there in awe of my stupidity.
Well, the script could keep running even after he would have detached from that tmux session due to losing ssh connection. And since that script would unblock all ports after 30 seconds…
Out of curiousity, how would nohup make your situation different? As I understand, nohup makes it possible to keep terminal applications running even when the terminal session has ended.
If the script was supposed to wait 30 secs and then unblock the ports, running with nohup would have allowed the ports to be unblocked 30 secs later. Instead, the script terminated when the SSH session died, and never executed the countdown nor unblock.
Happened to me in work once… I was connected via SSH to one of our test machines, so I could test connection disruption handling on a product we had installed.
I had a script that added iptables rules to block all ports for 30 seconds then unblock them. Of course I didn’t add an exception for port 22, and I didn’t run it with nohup, so when I ran the script it blocked the ports, which locked me out of SSH access, and the script stopped running when the SSH session ended so never unblocked the ports. I just sat there in awe of my stupidity.
tmuxAlways use tmux when possible for remote connections.
What does it do in this case?
Well, the script could keep running even after he would have detached from that tmux session due to losing ssh connection. And since that script would unblock all ports after 30 seconds…
(Same use case as nohup that they mentioned)
Tmux essentially creates a pseudo-shell that persists between sessions.
So you can start a process, detach the session, start something else, disconnect, come back next week, and check on it.
It does other things too. Like console tiling.
Out of curiousity, how would nohup make your situation different? As I understand, nohup makes it possible to keep terminal applications running even when the terminal session has ended.
If the script was supposed to wait 30 secs and then unblock the ports, running with nohup would have allowed the ports to be unblocked 30 secs later. Instead, the script terminated when the SSH session died, and never executed the countdown nor unblock.
Thanks for the elaborate answer!
Any time! :)