I need to add some firewall rules in our QA environment using iptables. I have to do the changes remotely . Some of the changes also include disabling SSH for few Networks . What are best practices I can follow so that if SSH service is somehow get blocked , how can I restore my access back without rebooting the host.Some of the things I am planning are: chkconfig iptables off This is in case if we need to reboot the host , so that iptables is not started up. But this is for when we reboot for host , I am looking for something so that we can restore back without rebooting the host . BTW , console is not available for the server. Any suggestions ? 
Best practises: Applying iptables firewall rules for SSH
rhel;iptables;firewall
That's what iptables-apply is for. From the man page:iptables-apply will  try  to  apply  a  new  rulesfile  (as  output  by   iptables-save,  read by iptables-restore) or run a command to configure   iptables and then prompt the user whether the changes are okay. If  the   new  iptables  rules  cut the existing connection, the user will not be   able to answer affirmatively. In this case, the script  rolls  back  to   the previous working iptables rules after the timeout expires.The default timeout is 10 seconds. If this is too short it can be changed with --timeout 30 to reset the rule after 30 seconds if no confirmation has been received.