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Configuring a Dead Man's Switch E-mail
A technique you can use to protect yourself against accidental lockout is a dead man's switch. This switch gets its name from the railroad industry, where the conductor's throttle had a switch that required pressure at all times to keep the train moving. This was to slow the train to a stop if the conductor had a heart attack or, a more likely scenario, fell asleep.

For your purposes, a dead man's switch enables a service but allows the administrator a temporary back door or other method to remediate an accidental lockout. A simple implementation of the dead man's switch is a one-line set of bash commands that runs prior to activating the firewall.

From Applications > Utilities, open the Terminal application.
Issue the following set of commands on a single line to test a set of firewall rules with a dead man's switch:

# sudo ls; sleep 90; sudo serveradmin start ipfilter; sudo serveradmin stop ipfilter
This process will enable the firewall and automatically disable the firewall in 90 seconds, allowing you time to verify that your remote access tools (such as ssh or ARD) are still working with the firewall enabled. If not, you can correct your firewall settings and test again before going live with the firewall.

Excerpted from Apple Training Series: Mac OS X Security and Mobility v10.6: A Guide to Providing Secure Mobile Access to Intranet Services Using Mac OS X Server v10.6 Snow Leopard by Robert Kite, Michele Hjorleifsson, Patrick Gallagher
 
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