[ale] Need a "back door" for a remote system.

[Jim Lynch]

I have a remote system that I need to find a failsafe recovery if it 
gets in trouble.  The only thing I can do with the system is get the sys 
admins to reboot restore the original  firewall if somehow I get locked 
out.  Since I run the ssh on an alternate port, that pretty much locks 
me out of the system. 

I know it's a sloppy way to do things, but I was hoping I use a web 
server to reset the ssh port somehow, but Apache is configured without 
suexec and it makes sense to leave it that way. 

I'm sort of toying with having a cron job running as root and testing to 
see if a specific web page has been touched in the last xxx hours and if 
not, then reset the sshd_config file to port 22 and restart ssh.  I'll 
run a cron job on another system to tickle the other one and if I find 
myself locked out, I'll just suspend that tickle for a while.

That's a hack I know, but I'm open to other suggestions.  No cpanel 
access (its a real cheap hosting service).  Webmin will not work if the 
firewall is reset, etc.

Thanks,
Jim.