Last week I wrote about fail2ban on FreeBSD. One note about that
is that service ipfw restart seems to break all connections. This
is frustrating / terrifying when you’re ssh’d into a machine and
running that command.
In my case I thought the box was inaccessible for a number of days before realising I could just reconnect (always test assumptions - advice I still fail to heed regularly).
I’ve read a number of discussions about this, but the answer that seems best is in this answer. Namely just run screen and reconnect when you get bounced.