I can’t believe I’ve never thought of this, Ask writes:
… used the at
daemon to automatically recover ... as root enter:
at "now + 5 minutes" service iptables stop
You can type a whole list of commands and when you're done, press ctrl-d to stop.
It will look something like:
# at "now + 5 minutes" service iptables stop job 6 at Tue Sep 18 17:53:03 2007 #
I'm particularly surprised I'd not thought of that since I often use at for watch dog timers, in Rube Goldberg devices that automate workflows, and before I got my Treo I'd do this all the time:
$ at 18:32 mail -s "put money in parking meter!" ask@example.com < /dev/null ^D job 8 at Tue Sep 18 18:32:00 2007
I used to use it for lots of such pests. send messages like "back out esting patch," "discard experimental foo install," "submit rebates," "check check cleared," but I do such things with my Treo now.